From the Margin to the Mainstream:
The Faculty Role in Advancing
Service-Learning on Community Colleges

In January 1995, Kapi'olani Community College (KCC) received a three-year grant from the Corporation for National Service and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) to integrate service-learning into a multicultural writing curriculum. In our proposal to AACC, we asserted that service-learning helps students cultivate a greater sense of civic responsibility and that this enhanced responsibility will contribute to a stronger civic democracy. This was, and is, the orthodox core belief of service-learning practitioners at community colleges across the nation. Many Kapi'olani faculty saw these enhanced civic democracy outcomes as beneficial.

Creating civic democracy, however, was not central to the stated campus mission. To fully integrate service-learning at Kapi'olani, the faculty needed to see it as an effective pedagogical tool for achieving existing specific and explicit educational objectives. At Kapi'olani these objectives are enhanced understanding of Hawaii's historical and contemporary role in the Asian-Pacific region and improved writing, critical-thinking, and reasoning skills.

The faculty involved in the Kapi'olani Asian-Pacific Emphasis (KAPE) now see service-learning as a powerful tool for helping students achieve greater understanding of Hawaii's multicultural history and community. KAPE faculty encourage students to explore their own traditions of service. KAPE faculty also believe that with an enhanced appreciation and understanding of diverse cultural conceptions of service, students will make greater contributions to civic democracy in Hawaii and the United States into the next century.

The Kapi'olani Community College faculty, committed to developing improved writing, critical-thinking, and reasoning skills, contribute to and identify with the college's Writing Across the Curriculum and Thinking/Reasoning Emphasis (WAC/TRE). They now see service-learning as a powerful tool for developing writing skills in conjunction with critical reflection. They believe that service and critical reflection contribute to enhanced listening, speaking, reading, and thinking skills and that these skills are required for engaged citizenship into the next century.

Service-learning also makes a central contribution to a new college development

initiative focusing on education connecting the classroom to the campus environment, community, nation, world, and Internet. In 1994, this initiative emerged during KCC's Kellogg Foundation/AACC Beacon project, Beyond the Classroom: International Education and the Community College.

Many of the faculty involved in KAPE and WAC/TRE share a common belief in the efficacy of cooperative, activated classroom learning. Many share a common belief that learning continues beyond the classroom, and they have been active in shaping a multicultural and international campus environment where students can continue to explore their American, as well as their Hawaiian, Pacific, and Asian cultural identities. Many KAPE and WAC/TRE faculty see service-learning as an extension of cooperative, activated learning into the community, and we are exploring opportunities for service-learning in international settings.

At Kapi'olani, service-learning builds community. For faculty committed to KAPE and WAC/TRE, service-learning has become a new tool for building a stronger faculty community and for building a stronger community of faculty and students. Further, by integrating service-learning into existing educational objectives, we are connecting it to the stated mission of the campus, and thus using service-learning to shape the current and future identity of the college in the community it serves.

Coordinating service-learning

Over the last decade, the most successful initiatives at Kapi'olani have been student-focused, faculty-driven, and administration-supported. Service-learning is no exception. Faculty launched the service-learning initiative because they saw it as an effective pedagogy for empowering students to become more engaged in their classrooms, their campus, their community, and their world. This engagement would produce a more educated citizenry, culturally aware and understanding, with improved communi-cation, thinking, and reasoning skills.

Faculty direct and drive the service-learning initiative. My office is housed and supported by the dean of instruction. Two other faculty coordinators work out of their offices, but service-learning has no geographic center on campus. Service-learning is broad-based, with participation from all four liberal arts departments and four vocational education departments.

For broad-based, faculty-driven initiatives to survive and thrive, leadership must come from different departments over time. Usually leadership is rotated between faculty and departments after a two-year period. Since 1995, Social Science and Language Arts faculty have been active leaders in service-learning. Nursing and Health Science faculty have also been active in promoting and implementing service-learning, and some of these faculty are slated for leadership positions in the immediate future. Leadership is usually associated with assigned time, and it is sometimes difficult for Nursing and Health Science faculty (who are compensated based on extensive student contact time rather than on credit load) to be given assigned time. For these faculty, summer stipends can be provided as compensation for their service-learning leadership.

In May 1995, after a pilot semester of service-learning, we implemented our first Service-Learning Summer Institute with about fifteen faculty attending. The institute was held for five days, the week immediately after the end of spring semester, when faculty were free from teaching responsibilities and intellectually charged for a summer of professional development and reinvigoration. The institute provided an opportunity to assess our first semester of service-learning, do some directed reading on conceptual and theoretical issues, revise course syllabi, and develop a second-year plan of action.

The institute began with an overview of the week's activities, followed by some discussion of links between service-learning and KAPE and WAC/TRE. In the afternoon, we brought in ten students to reflect on their service-learning experiences and give us their assessments and suggestions for improving service-learning at KCC. Three of the students had previously been asked to report to the University of Hawaii Board of Regents on their service-learning activities and were eager to share their successes with the faculty.

After hearing the compelling, sometimes emotional, stories of student service to the community, most faculty realized that service-learning was indeed a powerful pedagogical tool. This set the foundation for further conceptual discussions, as well as dialogue with community agency representatives on the second day of the institute. On the third day, we focused on effective critical reflection and debated how best to develop critical reflection in our diverse student population. We agreed that written reflection was important, but it was also a solitary, individual activity, and we were interested in building engaged interaction, in building community. Students of Polynesian ancestry, coming from strong oral traditions, may have sophisticated verbal skills, and reflection might be enhanced through group "talk story" activities. Reflection might be expressed in performing arts, ceramics, painting, and computer-assisted art.

On the fourth day of the institute, faculty were given time to integrate service-learning statements into their fall semester course syllabi. These syllabi were then presented to the faculty participants. This cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches resulted in another round of syllabi revision.

Throughout the week we left time for discussion of nuts-and-bolts issues like how to efficiently sign students up for service-learning, how to get site supervisors to commit to effective supervision of student service activities, liability, record-keeping and reporting requirements, and evaluation.

At the end of the week, faculty felt they had a much better understanding of the strengths of service-learning as a pedagogy, how it connected to KAPE, WAC/TRE and beyond the classroom initiatives, and, perhaps most important, they felt like they were part of a faculty community. We also had our service-learning coordinating plan in place. The plan is outlined below.

1. Faculty coordinators distribute ten service-learning applications and one Service-Learning Opportunities Handbook per faculty member.

2. Faculty distribute course syllabi on the first day of class, emphasize the service-learning option, and encourage students to pick up an application and review the handbook.

3. Students identify an appropriate agency and consult with a faculty member. Students may select an agency not in the handbook or create their own service projects with faculty supervision.

4. Students contact site supervisor, discuss course learning objectives, orientation and training, and sign a contract detailing responsibilities of student and site supervisor.

5. Student signs a "risk waiver" form and returns the completed application to the faculty member at the end of the third week of class.

6. Faculty member forwards completed applications to service-learning coordinators.

7. Students serve a minimum of twenty hours, usually two hours per week for ten weeks.

8. Faculty member and student interact to create a reflective journal connecting service to course concepts and theories.

9. Students are given opportunities to share their reflections with other students in class and more broadly with other KCC students.

10. Students complete related service-learning assignments.

This coordination plan worked reasonably well in academic year 1995-96. Over the course of two semesters, nearly four hundred students provided more than eight thousand hours of community service that would not have been provided otherwise. Through collaboration with seventy different schools, hospitals, clinics, and nonprofit organizations, KCC students conducted directed readings to preschool and elementary school children, tutored at-risk adolescent youth, worked one-on-one with the severely disabled, provided hospice and elderly care, worked for the Hawaii state judiciary, produced a community-based newsletter, operated an HIV/AIDS hotline, and provided numerous other services.

We held a second summer institute in May 1996 and are currently developing our overall coordination plan for 1996-97. The new plan pays much more attention to student orientation, evaluation of learning outcomes, reducing faculty paperwork responsibilities, and sustainability. We also hope to make stronger connections to Student Services and Student Activities.

Administrative support remains at a high level. The dean of instruction provides three credits of assigned time per semester, office space, photocopying access, computer equipment and Internet access, and some clerical support. The provost is a strong advocate for service-learning, having benefited from his community service activity during his university experience. The chancellor of the University of Hawaii Community Colleges system has supported the involvement of all eight UHCC campuses in the Hawaii State Campus Compact, and the University of Hawaii system president is a former member of the national executive board of Campus Compact.

Lessons from the field: conceptualizing and coordinating

In November 1995, I was selected as a national mentor in service-learning by the Campus Compact National Center for Community Colleges and was assigned mentoring responsibilities in Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. I basically adopted a cultural anthropological methodology in developing my mentoring strategies. Before I went to each campus (field site), I tried to familiarize myself with the campus culture by interviewing campus representatives and/or reading available literature, such as the catalog.

In terms of service-learning and campus culture, some of the key components include administrative support, in particular, the role and commitment of academic deans and the dean of students, current educational initiatives, types of vocational education programs, and the college's history of involvement in the community.

I basically took the KCC model of service-learning to each campus. I tried to emphasize the connection between service-learning and civic democracy, as well as connect service-learning to existing, specific and explicit educational objectives. I also tried to emphasize the student-focused, faculty-driven, administration-supported qualities of service-learning at KCC. Further, I encouraged each campus to use service-learning as a means to create a new identity for their campus in the community they serve.

For the University of Hawaii community college workshops, my overall strategy was to co-present with KCC faculty colleagues who were taking leadership roles and/or doing innovative projects in service-learning. Faculty response was strong from two of the three UHCC campuses we visited, and these two campuses sent faculty to our Service-Learning Summer Institute. These two campuses have already identified new faculty service-learning coordinators for fall semester 1996.

		Service-Learning at the Community College of Rhode Island
		Collaboration in Action: Service-Learning at Middlesex Community College
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