Gettysburg College (Gettysburg,
PA)
Nicaragua
as a Template
Summary
Gettysburg College provides faculty development opportunities and support
to faculty interested in learning how they might integrate the College’s
existing local, regional, national, and international service opportunities
into their courses. A political science course incorporating a two-week
service-learning trip to Nicaragua served as a template for this initiative
and a faculty liaison position was established to support the faculty
development program.
The Practice
Working together, the Provost’s Office and the Center for Public
Service supported a faculty member in the design and development of a
course about the political economy and global inequality that would include
a two-week service-learning trip to Nicaragua. The success of this course
was used as a template to further faculty knowledge about how to make
use of off-campus educational service opportunities to teach about and
illustrate to students the complexity of concepts such as development
and global inequality. In keeping with the college’s growing emphasis
on learning assessment, there was also a desire to help faculty learn
how they might assess the impact that the incorporation of such a service-learning
experience might have on student learning.
Workshops were held in conjunction with the Center for Public Service
in order to explain to faculty the process by which such a course might
be created. Faculty were also apprised of the types of issues involved
in traveling overseas with a group of students, the lead time necessary
to develop a working relationship with community partners in the host
country, and the kind of service-learning projects that might work best
abroad. In addition, a “pre-test” and “post-test”
survey instrument was developed for the course as a means of attempting
to measure student learning and was made available to the faculty.
To follow-up and further support faculty in this course development process,
the provost created a faculty liaison position to the Center for Public
Service. This position is a permanent institutional role that carries
with it a course release of one course per year. The faculty member is
selected in consultation with the director of the Center for Public Service
and has clearly defined responsibilities including the submission of an
annual report. The faculty liaison has worked with the following academic
disciplines as follow-up to the above mentioned workshops: African American
Studies, Biology, Economics, Environmental Studies, History, Latin American
Studies, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Spanish, and Theatre Arts.
Funding exists for faculty members to make trips to service-learning sites
in order to make contacts with community partners, identify their needs
and interests, and develop the appropriate project for a course.
Effectiveness
Attendance at the faculty development workshops has been strong. A number
of faculty members identified course topics, social justice issues, and
off-campus sites. A number of interdisciplinary study programs, among
them African American Studies, Latin American Studies, and a soon-to-be-proposed
Peace and Justice Studies program, are considering incorporating a course
of this nature into their requirements for either the major or the minor.
Faculty have integrated a Washington, DC site into a course on the literature
of homelessness and are currently working on integrating Native American
sites into Environmental Studies and Education courses and a Baltimore
site into an Economics course.
Gettysburg College faculty members include their service-learning related
work in their tenure and promotion files as either part of their teaching
or their scholarship. The current provost has made a practice of highlighting
this type of engagement on the part of faculty members in his tenure and
promotion letters to the president of the College.
In the last three years Gettysburg College has made an intensive effort
to make it possible for interested faculty to incorporate service-learning
opportunities at either the local, national, regional, or international
levels into the curriculum. Support for these efforts have ranged from
workshops, sponsored by the Center for Public Service and the newly established
Johnson Center for Creative Teaching, to one-semester course releases
to allow faculty to develop courses with a service-learning component,
to the proposal of a service-learning course designator for courses that
include service-learning components so that students and faculty are able
to identify these courses prior to registration. Finally, a recently completed
reform of the curriculum identifies service-learning courses as one way
that students can fulfill the student-learning outcome of “local
and global citizenship.” The combination of these endeavors has
not only developed faculty knowledge and skills but transformed the academic
culture at Gettysburg College.
Resources
The
Center for Public Service at Gettysburg College
Copies of the pre-test and post-test survey instruments developed as
a means of assessing student learning can be accessed here.
Contact Information
Caroline A. Hartzell
Department of Political Science
Gettysburg College
300 North Washington Street
Gettysburg, PA 17325
Phone: 717-337-6045
chartzel@gettysburg.edu
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Effective
Practices Exchange
