Learning through Service David Concepcion Ball State University

Transcription

1 Learning through Service David Concepcion Ball State University There are many definitions, types, and goods of service learning. 3 In this paper, I argue that service should be incorporated into a course when it enhances student achievement of appropriate learning goals, and that this enhancement is best achieved when the service is part of a larger cycle of scaffoled and aligned assignments. I briefly offer a framework for deciding whether one should incorporate a service unit into a course. After describing an instance of when I think the answer is yes, I think aloud regarding how to scaffold and align service work into an existing course. Why Have a Service-Learning Unit? In my experience, the predominantly cognitive exposure through reading to some of the standard content in environmental ethics did not engender particularly searching critical thinking in students. Very few students were intellectually humble enough to seriously consider the possibility that their initial intuitively held view should be rejected. Dissatisfied with the depth of student thinking, I searched for other, less cognitive, ways for students to interact with this material. Why have a service-learning unit? I answer, to enrich students critical thinking regarding course content. Which service-learning? I settled on a class wide, weeklong experience where each student provided ten to twelve hours of service to a local environmental agency. Let me explain why I made these choices. As with any course or unit, the decision of which experiences to offer students begins by reflecting on learning objectives. And, which learning objectives are appropriate depends in part on what function the course plays in a curriculum. Is the course primarily core curriculum, early major, inter-disciplinary, mid major, late major, other? The subject matter also influences which learning objectives are appropriate. I teach environmental ethics, which is simultaneously a core curriculum course, a course that serves an inter-disciplinary sustainability minor, and an early major course. Given these various reasons for registration and subject matter, which content mastery, skill development, and/or dispositional growth should students experience? Among the many answers to this question, here I address my aspiration for students to critically evaluate their beliefs regarding some of the standard fare in environmental ethics: anthropocentrism, sentientism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. The larger learning objective I use this 3 See, for example, National Service-Learning Clearinghouse: Campus Compact: The National Task Force of Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future, American Association of Colleges and Universities (2012); Colby, Beaumont, Ehrlich, & Corngold, Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 2007); Patrick Fitzgerald, Service-Learning and the Socially Responsible Ethics Class, Teaching Philosophy 20 (1997); Ramona Ilea and Susan Hawthorne, Beyond Service Learning: Civic Engagement in Ethics Classes, Teaching Philosophy 34 (2011); Goodwin Liu, Knowledge, Foundations, and Discourse: Philosophical Support for Service-Learning, in Beyond the Tower: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Philosophy, C. David Lisman and Irene E. Harvey, eds., American Association for Higher Education (2000); and Calvin F. Exoo, An Experiment in Environmental Service-Learning, in Harold Ward (ed.), Acting Locally: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Environmental Studies (American Association for Higher Education (1999).

2 material to target is an increase in intellectual humility. I hope to help students recognize that their s is only one perspective among many, context influences which view is best, and mature view-holding involves the ability to articulate plausible justifications. Early in the semester students practice specific ways to identify and evaluate central defenses of positions found in readings. With this initial skill training in place, when we come to anthropocentrism, sentientism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism, students begin by reading for initial exposure to the ideas and then we have interactive discussions to clarify and solidify basic content mastery. Since standard classroom interactions and out-of-class readings were not sufficiently moving students toward the multifaceted learning objective of intellectual humility, I wondered what else might I try. I thought that a less cognitive interaction with the material could disrupt students sufficiently such that they would be in a position to earnestly question their initial view. The less cognitive interaction I settled on in my attempt to bring students to the learning objective of intellectual humility in environmental ethics was service learning. Again, service work is justified when it helps students better achieve appropriate learning objectives. Putting the Learning in Service-Learning My goal is a win-win proposition; I want students to learn and I want a community need to be met. But without an emphasis on course-related learning, service work as a course requirement is difficult to justify. Perhaps more courses should have learning objectives that involve the type of growth associated with service work, but if they do not, requiring service work will problematically reduce the alignment of the course the learning objectives, daily work, and graded assignments will not mutually reinforce one another. Again, I seek service activities that will contribute to an increase in students ability to critically engage a debate regarding moral considerability and moral significance. 4 I want students to interact with non-humans, and largely with non-animals, in a way that should get them to take more seriously biocentrism and ecocentrism. After talking with a number of stakeholders, I settled on having students remove invasive species at a local land conservancy. Students would kill some plants primarily for the benefit of other plants. Many students thought it strange to act instrumentally on behalf of plants and many were not comfortable conceiving of themselves as intentional killers. Beyond physical exertion, 5 the activity made students uncomfortable in ways that were especially valuable for thinking about the merits of biocentrism. Nuts and bolts: After a safety talk and orientation, each student works as directed by the community partner for ten to twelve hours within a one-week period. In most cases, this number of hours results in students making three trips to the community partner s site, which was my goal. Typical effort involves students working in pairs: one lopping, say, bush honeysuckle, while another follows by dabbing a very small amount of herbicide on the resulting stump. The students drive two vans back and forth from campus from 7am to 7pm so that all thirty students perform their ten to twelve hours within the same week. (Coordinating all these trips is quite time consuming; if you are considering a similar activity, give yourself plenty of time to schedule transportation.) No student misses any of their classes, although some 4 For more on moral considerability and significance, see Kenneth Goodpaster, On Being Morally Considerable, The Journal of Philosophy, 74/6 (1978), Accommodations are made for students with mobility issues. For example, through our Disabled Student Services office I was able to rent a four-wheel drive wheelchair for one student.

3 students needed to rearrange shifts at places where they work for wages. The project was initially funded by a Campus Compact grant, so each student had goggles, loppers, gloves, incest repellant, sun tan lotion, etc. After the first year when they were paid for by grant funds, the cost of operating the vans has been borne by my department. The community partner provides herbicide. I usually join students in the field for a number of hours as well. To connect the service activity to course learning, students journal and write an argumentative paper. After each shift, each student writes in the left column of a double-entry journal. Students are instructed to vividly describe their experience using plenty of adverbs and adjectives while reporting on each of their five senses. The point of this journaling is to capture the experience in approximately 500 words. At then end of the week, each student creates an approximately 250 word reflective entry in the right hand column of their journal for each existing entry in the left hand side. Here students are instructed to explicitly connect their experience with the course content. References to relevant texts are encouraged. Finally, to finish their journaling, students write a word highlight statement that describes a moment during the week that influenced their thinking about moral considerability and moral significance. One option is to describe why they did not have such an aha moment. Some of the evidence that the service learning had the disruptive effect I hoped for can be seen in comments from student journals. As one student said, I formerly thought that non-sentient beings aren t morally considerable, but the fact that I felt so murderous, sad, and guilty about killing them makes me think that they are. In contrast, another student wrote, Moral considerability can t just be a function of how I feel about things, because then the Star Wars trilogy would be morally considerable. Along a different track, Why does being native get you more moral significance? Yet another line of inquiry, If the mess we re in is a result of our failed earlier attempts to control the environment, why is the solution to attempt even more control? This last one speaks for itself: Heidegger was right in The Question Concerning Technology. 6 The essence of technology is to reduce everything into a standing reserve of energy. I was a piece of technology all I was doing was what I was told, and I could have easily refrained. I was assaulting my own integrity; I was reducing myself to a machine. If I didn t have the moral strength to resist [Dr. Concepción s order to kill plants], how would it be possible for me to resist totalitarian terror? My feelings turned to real shame shame turned to resolve: Do not become a machine! Get some #%@damn motives, I told myself. We maintain class sessions during this week, where we continue discussing related readings. 7 The final connection between learning and service is a larger, argumentative paper, where students must defend the plausibility of their preferred theory of individual, direct moral considerability or argue that the writing prompt Which individual, direct theory of moral considerability is best? is problematic. Each student is 6 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Harper Torchbooks, 1982) 7 Goodpaster, op. cit.; Peter Carruthers, The Animal Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ; Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Tioga Pub. Co., 1974); Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford, 1949); Karen Warren, The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism, Environmental Ethics, 12/2 (1990), ; Donald VanDeVeer, Interspecific Justice, Inquiry, 1-2 (1979),

4 required to discuss how the service activity influenced her/his thinking regarding moral considerability. The essays that most students produce, especially when compared to the essays they produced when I did not have a service-learning unit in this course, tend to be nuanced, concrete, and passionate. Most of them demonstrate the richer thinking I was hoping to engender. Examples include: (Paraphrasing) If asian bush honeysuckle helps the biotic health in Chine, it s right for it to be there according to Leopold, but it s wrong here because it doesn t help biotic health. Rightness is influenced by circumstances. 8 Quoting: I feel the work I did shows an extreme specieisism because I was taking a human peripheral interest over a basic interest of the plant. This puzzles me because I don t like extreme speciesism. While not conclusive, I believe the student comments in this and the previous paragraph illustrate that the service work in my course enhanced students intellectual humility. Importantly, even if there were no such evidence, the first point I hope to make here should still stand. Service work should be the learning activity of choice when the specific service is expected to help students achieve valuable learning objectives at least as well, and preferably better than, the pursuit of any other activity. Aligned Service Notice that the service learning in my course is transparently aligned. Alignment is achieved when student learning activities and graded assignments are instrumental to students achieving the course learning objectives. If the learning objective is to improve critical thinking, then students should engage in, and be given course credit for, critical thinking. Of course, reading excellent examples of disciplinespecific critical thinking is not unrelated to improving one s critical thinking skills. Similarly, watching/listening to an expert model critical thinking is also useful. But neither reading about critical thinking nor watching critical thinking happen is thinking critically. Insofar as improvement occurs through practice, a course is out of alignment when students are not engaged in repeated, guided practice of the relevant skills that constitute course objectives. If you want to become a better piano player you should practice playing the piano and attempt new techniques with formative guidance. You won t get much better at playing the piano by reading about piano playing; nor will you get much better by watching experts play. Alignment is transparent when it is easy for students to see the connection between what they do weekly, their success in the course (largely, how well they do on graded assignments), and their learning. In my course, the readings, service work, class discussions, double-entry journaling, and argumentative paper writing are scaffolded or sequenced to empower deeper critical thinking. The inclusion of service work, valuable as it may be in isolation, is justified insofar as it is part of a sequence of activities that take students to the learning objectives of the course. Service work is positioned correctly in a course when it accelerates students achievement of valuable learning objectives. Let me end with a quick survey of some of the choices I made when designing this unit. First, I sought a win-win proposition, an activity that would meet a community need while engendering appropriate learning. Second, since the learning I was targeting was intra-unit, I required each student to perform roughly the same service work. In a semester long internship, for example, it is likely that a wider variety of service should be encouraged. Third, I gave credit not for service hours worked, although they were a pre-requisite, but for course work: journaling and paper writing. While the community partner and I discuss student performance, as the relevant disciplinary expert I retained sole authority over the assigning of grades. Fourth, I explicitly transparently aligned the sequence of activities. Prior to the service work, I explained to students how their experience is related to learning and during service week I highlighted in class the connections between their work and the course content. Students build through 8 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, op. cit.

5 lived experience and double-entry journaling to a disciplinarily appropriate argumentative writing assignment that required the integration of the service activity and the course material.