Service-learning and community relationships

Prior to the introduction of a service learning final project within the course “Introduction to Networked Systems”, students completed a final project in which they were asked to be consultants for a fictional public library.  Students were assigned to one of several teams, each of which were to provide recommendations to the library board (their fellow students) regarding the significant upgrade to the existing technology services within the library.  The project required research into the types of technologies currently implemented within libraries as well as to research newly emerging technologies.  They also needed to balance overall costs to most effectively meet the stated objectives within the “RFP” presented to them mid-semester.

During the Fall 2000 semester, about half the students participated in the traditional final project, while the other half chose to participate in a final project in which they refurbished donated computers, installed operating systems, and networked those computers together.   These computers were subsequently installed by the final project teams at the end of the semester in one of several non-governmental organizations within the East St. Louis area. Beyond the trip to East St. Louis to deliver the computers, students also traveled to the community mid-semester to perform a site survey to determine specific needs and identify existing resources.  Less research was done to determine implementations at other Community Technology Centers (CTCs), the availability/desirability of emerging technologies, and balancing costs (little funding was available for implementation, instead students used primarily donated equipment).  But on the other hand, students gained more hands-on experience working with technology and the challenges of implementing technology within community.

Prior to the first trip to East St. Louis, as the instructor I strongly emphasized the responsibilities the students were assuming as consultants to these community organizations.  I stressed the importance of professional behavior and the philosophy that the customer is always right.  While we certainly didn’t want to discount our own expertise and wanted to appropriate advise our customers, we also wanted to appreciate that they were the ones who would ultimately be implementing their programs using these computers and we wanted to be appreciative of their expertise in that implementation.  To that end, they might decide on configurations that were against our own better judgment, but that was probably based on their own deeper understanding of their overall objectives.  Essentially, we were to put into practice in this service-learning option for a final project what the rest of the class was role-playing within the former traditional final project for the course.

This community member as client approach to service learning was one with which the students could easily relate. All of them had had both positive and negative interactions with service providers within and outside of the technology field.  To that end, they by and large worked at trying to model the more positive qualities they had seen in service providers.  I continued to use this approach for the first several semesters in which the service-learning project was implemented as part of the course.  But I found somewhat disconcerting the ways and means in which students would sometimes try to sell their specific implementation plans to their community clients.  On occasion, these could be rather confrontational as students and community members each had firmly held ideals of how to best proceed.  Probably the most touchy topic was parental control software.  Some of the students, primarily masters-level Library and Information Science students, strongly felt that such software was a restriction of free speech and therefore an abomination.  Community members, on the other hand, were reflecting the ideals and principles of their community in asking for ways to keep curious youth from those parts of the Internet they found were in conflict with those ideals and principles.  I knew something needed to change after one particular site survey visit in which, despite my active interventions, a student and a community member had several extended dialogs that monopolized much of the the groups assigned two hour block to perform the site survey.

A second event that occurred about the same time provided a new ideal of the relationship that should exist between the academic institution and the local community.  In this case, the students had completed a site survey and returned to Urbana-Champaign.  In subsequent communiques with their site coordinator for a church in East St. Louis, they began receiving conflicting information.  The intended use and specific location of the lab changed, they expectations of what would be accomplished by the students changed, and overall the tone deteriorated.  I decided that for the sake of the students, I needed to return to East St. Louis to speak with the site coordinator to clarify specifically what we could and couldn’t accomplish during the course of the semester, and that if that was not acceptable, to identify an alternate community site.

While there, I met with not only the site coordinator, but her pastor.  In this way, I came to better appreciate the role of the site coordinator vis a vis the pastor of the church.  The site coordinator had little in the way of authority over the lab, and as such, the changes in understanding occurred because the pastor had provided greater definition of his goals after we had left East St. Louis.  To that end, the conversation that afternoon was primarily between the pastor and myself.  I found it confusing and frustrating that the pastor seemed to be actively throwing verbal barbs at me, as if he were goading me into an unprofessional response.  Finally, after about 45 minutes of such dialog, I did indeed throw a verbal barb back his direction.  He instantly broke into a smile and responded “now we’re talking!”.  He went on to clarify that he missed the deep relationships he had built with the founders of the East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) during its early days.  In his viewpoint, it wasn’t until I felt comfortable enough to throw barbs back that I could stop being his service provider and begin being his partner.

Following that interaction, I began to describe to the students a new concept for the relationship between the class and the community, that of partners.  I aggressively removed language from my class notes and my own speech that referred to community members as clients, and replaced it with partners.  I added a section before our first trip to East St. Louis the next semester that described how the students were beneficiaries of  the rich partnerships developed by ESLARP over the years and how the students would affect those partnerships to the positive or negative, depending on their actions.  (It’s not that I didn’t recognize ESLARP and it’s history before, but I had never stressed the partnerships aspect before.)  I also added a visioning exercise in which students were asked to imagine their experience on a blind date, such that at the end, things had gone so well they wanted to see that person again.  They were then stepped through a second blind date in which they were turned off by the other person to the point they had no intentions of ever trying to talk to that person again.  We then reflected on the differences that contribute to a positive first meeting and the factors that contribute towards the building of a longer term relationship.

While not always perfect, the interactions between students and their community partners has steadily improved since the time the approach was changed, emphasizing community member as partner.  Indeed, relationship building is a two way street and students are now more aware than ever when they end up with a site coordinator that is not interested in partnership but is instead looking for a service provider.  These differences are especially emphasized during those semesters when a different group ends up with a site coordinator that is especially gifted at establishing a partnership.  Fortunately, through group reflections and the final class presentations, the whole class is able to learn from these comparisons.

As important as these changes have been for the students, I believe the changes I’ve experienced in my relationships with community members in East St. Louis has been equally or more critical.  Over the course of 15 semesters, I have transitioned from community member as client, to community member as partner, and most recently, in a number of cases community member as friend.  The changes in my relationships with community members in East St. Louis has brought with it an ever greater depth of understanding of the challenges faced by minorities within our culture, and especially of minorities who find themselves located in an economically distressed community like East St. Louis.  I’ve often come to appreciate the depth of character and resources it takes to survive under, let alone overcome, such circumstances.  This understanding has not only affected my professional approach within academia, but also my personal life in numerous positive ways.  This in turn has subsequent benefits for those with whom I interact, from family and friends to students and business associates.  I continue a process of discovery personally regarding the transformative process for me specifically started during the fall of 2000 and the implementation of service learning within that one course.

Discovery!

In 1998 I added a number of hands-on, active learning activities to the course Introduction to Networked Information Systems. This transition opened a number of doors for students to gain a more practical understanding of the components that make up computers and networks, and to discover some of the challenges in working with the technology. While relatively controlled, the unpredictable nature of working with technology assured that every semester brought its share of “learning moments” in which the students and I would have to work together to solve problems. In the Fall of 2000, a service-learning component was also added to the course in which students refurbished donated computers, set them up into small labs, and delivered these labs to community organizations working within economically distressed communities around Illinois, and especially within East St. Louis, Illinois. The nature of the work meant that students would often strike off in unique, unpredicted directions in order to appropriately setup the computer labs for their commuity partners. This further increased the number of learning moments.

During these learning moments, we would occasionally reach a point where I, as the instructor, would perform a sequence of steps that would resolve the problem. Students would ask me how I knew precisely what to do to address that problem. While many times I could describe what I observed and why I chose to take certain steps, there were times when my very unsatisfactory answer was “gut instinct”. Students didn’t like hearing this answer, and I felt uncomfortable giving it, but I also didn’t have a good explanation for how I seemed to be able to do what others couldn’t readily do. I needed to find a better answer.

At the time, I had been reading “The Dragon Riders of Pern”, fiction that included characters filling roles as apprentice, journeyman, and master. I began to reflect on my own childhood working in my family’s sawmill as a youth. I realized that I had served as an apprentice under my dad during those childhood years, eventually working my way up in status and responsibility at the job. An advantage of being an apprentice is that you are assigned rather menial tasks that provide you with a lot of time to observe. You begin to tune into the rhythm and music of the craft. Certain loud clashes went seemingly unnoticed by the others in the facility, while a slight, almost inaudible change in pitch of a constant sound might bring about great scurrying of everyone available. Over time, I found I began to adopt similar responses, and began to understand the unremarkable noises from the signs of significant problems. Indeed, over time I internalized these responses to the point where I couldn’t tell a friend visiting why I responded as I did. I reasoned this might be what is meant by gut instinct.

The question then became, short of an extended apprenticeship, how could such lessons be taught. Over time, I came to realize that a core skill students needed was one they already possessed, that of troubleshooting. Or that of the scientific method. Or that of the inquiry process. Or as one student who had served in the military once remarked, the OODA-loop — the military equivalent. For purposes of my class, I distilled it down to four basic steps:

• Observe — use all your senses to take in as much information as you can;
• Think — consider the various possible causes;
• Plan — consider how you might test each possible cause considered, as well as which tests might be easiest to run or most likely to succeed; and
• Act — perform the selected test, then observe, think, plan, and act.

It seems rather obvious now that gut instinct is really just a very rapid application of the above four steps, combined with an historical perspective that allows a person to rule out many of the possible causes as unlikely and narrow in on the most likely causes. Still, for me this was a discovery that helped transform my teaching in a way that allowed me to empower the students very early on in the semester.

I can say that students don’t always appreciate the empowerment — at times they would be much happier to receive simple cheatsheets that they can carry with them and that would fix the problems. And in truth there is a fine balance between strongly encouraging them to practice the troubleshooting skills vs. pushing them over the edge and into unrecoverable frustration. Identifying when to step in and provide more guidance, vs. when to help them ask salient questions and think through the process is a key part of the art of teaching in my mind. But when practiced well, I find I now am able to help encourage the development of gourmet chefs who can walk into a situation, identify the needs and resources, and combine them to produce a meal worthy of a fine restaurant, as opposed to someone who reads the box every time they make spaghetti.

Building a Program of Service Learning

I had a great meeting today with Anke Voss and Noah Lenstra. We discussed a number of points about effective implementation of service learning that will be summarized elsewhere. But one topic of special note highlighted in our discussion is the need for a more integrative approach to service learning implementation.

My service learning activities typically occur under the ESLARP umbrella, as has Anke’s. And while there certainly is some sharing between classes that occurs following dinner on Friday nights, this is fairly superficial. Some sharing also occurs through newsletters put out at the end of each semester, and through occasional joint presentations.

Our discussion did not dismiss or diminish the value of these experiences, but instead pointed towards a need for a more substantive interaction between participants in ESLARP that would deepen the learning for all involved. In my class, “Introduction to Networked Systems”, almost since semester one I have stressed reflection at both the individual and project group level. More recently, I have been refining ways in which the class comes together as a whole to participate in meaningful reflection during the course of the semester. At first, this was group presentations following the two trips to East St. Louis. This past semester, when we stayed nine days/six nights in East St. Louis, we had class-wide reflections on a nightly basis. By the final night, the depth of the reflections had grown considerably, as did the learning that occurred through them.

I believe the conclusion Anke, Noah, and I were coming to in our discussion today was the need to take one further step; to move beyond the rich reflective process that is beginning to happen at the class level and add a reflective process that occurs at the program level. We envisioned a process that would facilitate a more holistic approach to learning and public engagement that better emphasized the multifaceted approaches that are needed to facilitate social inclusion for members of disenfranchised communities.

In the book Expanding Boundaries: Service and Learning, Andrew Furco summarizes work by Robert Sigmon regarding types of service learning. Using capital letters to distinguish emphasis, Sigmon describes a range of implementations of service learning, from service-learning, in which the goals of service and learning are completely separate, to SERVICE-LEARNING, in which the goals of service and learning are completely balanced and integrated. It seems difficult or unlikely that the type of reflective process we were envisioning during today’s meeting could be accomplished by bringing together students participating in service-learning courses that completely separate the two components, or service-LEARNING courses that emphasize primarily learning, or SERVICE-learning courses that primarily emphasize service. Optimally, courses would be identified in which SERVICE-LEARNING fully integrates and balances both components. With this common approach to discovery and engagement, students would likely be primed to benefit from the broader contextual realm fostered through inter-class reflections.

We also discussed some of the environmental conditions needed to foster such an inter-class reflective activity. Both Anke and I have found that students working together on a project seem to naturally participate in a shared experience and reflection as they work on projects at their host sites. These sites are often in informal settings that feel relaxed and contribute to open sharing. This is often not the case when students are brought together in conference- or classroom settings. Of note, my Summer I offering of “Intro to Network Systems” was the first time I felt the class as a whole really came together and actively participated in a broader, but deep, reflective process. It is also the first time that we stayed at the Hubbard House, a facility in East St. Louis that has intentionally built spaces aimed at creating relaxed environments for meaningful sharing amongst groups. Can such class-wide reflections, let alone inter-class reflections, be facilitated at the Ramada, or back in Champaign? This is an open question that will require further consideration.

At the end of our discussion, we also brainstormed some on the concept of a “Community Informatics Studio”. The idea is to provide a place where not only the reflections, but the actual project work, could transcend a single course. Some of the newer projects we’ve started considering in East St. Louis do not easily fit into a single course, or indeed department, as a project, but move into a broader Community Informatics realm that requires a multidisciplinary approach. While similar to the current LIS490CIC, “Community Informatics Corp”, one possibility would be that this studio would tap into students who are currently taking other courses and would encompass their final service-learning projects within those courses. Another option would be that this course would be comprised of students who have come from other classes, whose projects are to design specific projects for these other courses, and thereby serve as a starting point for the creation of new service-learning opportunities for other courses. Both may provide a means for broader implementation of service-learning in GSLIS (and other departmental courses) and provide opportunities for students to participate in multi-disciplinary project teams. But if the course were to provide a place where students who are taking a range of students in a current semester come together to work on a multidisciplinary community informatics service-learning project, the studio might also foster the type of cross-class reflections that could further enhance the learning process for all students during the semester.