by Stephen Hill, Academic Co-lead, Student Pathways for Community Impact Working Group
As the last of summer dwindles away, university and college professors begin one of their busiest times of year: starting new courses, organizing assignments, labs, seminars and teaching materials, and getting to know students. It鈥檚 a wonderful kind of busy, but busy it is.
For the past six or seven years, I鈥檝e kick started my fall with a series of service learning opportunities for students in our first year environmental science and studies course. It鈥檚 a large course – over 300 students – with the vast majority of students being from outside of Peterborough and not knowing much about the community. As part of the first assignment, students have the opportunity to serve as volunteers for the , , the , or with bike survey organized by and the . Students are asked to write a reflective and critical piece afterward.
Peterborough GreenUp project participants hard at work processing data.聽漏Elizabeth Thipphawong
The partnerships have emerged organically over the years with different partners gradually joining the mix. The upshot is that over 250 students now have the opportunity to learn about and work with the community in their first month of university. This is so important for building student engagement in the course and with the material. Most importantly from the CFICE perspective, the community partners absolutely depend on the students in their projects.
But, here鈥檚 the thing. Scratch a bit below the surface and what seems like a great venture is, in reality, a huge amount of work during the busiest time of year. I鈥檇 be lying if I said there weren鈥檛 days that I regret ever agreeing to 鈥渟ee if some students would be interested in helping.鈥� Organizing the logistics of assigning students to volunteer opportunities, insurance waivers, health and safety training, transportation, dealing with colleagues whose classes the students miss to volunteer, trying to ensure our community partners have students that can help, and figuring out some academic rationale for this all is sometimes overwhelming. Added to this mix are the regular challenges that first year students are facing when transitioning to a new setting and the hundreds of emails that circulate in any large course. I feel less like a hard-working teacher and more like a sucker for punishment.
But I do this work because I think it鈥檚 important. I know it鈥檚 crucially important for our community partners and I like to think it鈥檚 important for the students. The partnerships aren鈥檛 perfect and, to be honest, I鈥檝e always been flying by the seat of my pants with these projects. I didn鈥檛 even know that 鈥渟ervice learning鈥� was a thing until my friends at the told me about it. There鈥檚 certainly no master plan here.
But now, with the CFICE project, I hope that part of our work on the Student Pathways working group will be to better understand how this type of service learning might fit within a broader curriculum pathway. It might tell us how these students鈥� service learning experiences prepare them for more complex community-campus engagement. Or maybe there are other more important things that we should be doing to set our students on a path to be successful partners in community-based research. Either way, I鈥檓 excited to find out鈥 guess I really do love September.