For more than a year, five community college service-learning
faculty members have taken up the call to advance service-learning on their
campuses and throughout the nation through The Faculty Role: From the Margin
to the Mainstream project. They have built a cadre of service-learning
faculty on their own campuses, engaged more than three hundred faculty
on over fifty other campuses through workshops and training sessions, and
have presented workshops at several state and national conferences.
Project faculty members have enhanced their own skills in employing
service-learning strategies in their classes and on their campuses. In
addition, they have aligned service-learning efforts with their own professional
development and have received awards, promotions, and other recognition
for their work.
This sourcebook contains their stories, their contributions, and their
work to advance service-learning as an authentic pedagogy. It is chockfull
of rich information, resources, and strategies that assist faculty and
others interested in moving service-learning to the core of the academy.
The Margin to the Mainstream sourcebook is divided into three sections.
The first examines five models of integrating service-learning on community
colleges; the second identifies lessons from the field that have been gleaned
from the project's first year; and the third offers five case studies providing
scenarios and dilemmas for the reader to consider.
You will notice that the five models are very distinctive, proving,
we believe, that there is no one right way to integrate service-learning
into the academic curriculum. There are some similarities in the models,
including the salient role of faculty and aligning service-learning with
good teaching and scholarship. We encourage you to examine the model at
your institution and consider how the models we present can help you advance
service-learning on your campus.
The Lessons from the Field section identifies general, conceptual,
and practical lessons we have garnered from our experiences in the project's
first year. Examine these lessons and consider how corresponding strategies
may be employed in your work and in the work of other faculty on your campus.
The five case studies offer you an opportunity to examine a particular
scenario and derive solutions to corresponding dilemmas. We have not provided
the solutions; however, we believe the previous two sections in this sourcebook
and the references begin to frame possible strategies to overcome barriers
and facilitate service-learning as an effective pedagogy.
We challenge you to use this sourcebook for both its content and process.
We believe the information is valuable in advancing service-learning strategies.
We also believe the process of presenting models, lessons from the field,
and case studies is effective to motivate and educate faculty to integrate
service-learning into their courses.
-Terry Pickeral
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