Community-Based Learning Courses Take Off around the College

Sixteen faculty members have received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop or modify courses to incorporate principles of community-based learning (CBL). The result is six new and revised courses now underway, with more in the works for the next few semesters. CBL integrates theory and practice and teaches students to "read experience like a text."

This semester, Preston Smith, assistant professor of politics, has revised his Colloquium in Politics: Community Development, which now includes participation in one of three research projects on programs at Springfield's Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center. While MHC students have performed community service there for years, this is the first time they are conducting research for and on its programs and clients. "Community-based learning provides an outstanding introduction to the difficulties of applying social science methodology to concrete social life," Smith said.

Jennifer Horton '99, student coordinator for the Community Service Volunteer Program, had previously done volunteer work at Gorse Child Study Center. She finds that the structure of Sandra Lawrence's education course--Race, Class, Culture, and Gender in the Classroom--offers tools that allow greater reflection on her work in an after-school program for learning-disabled students at the King Center. "The class provides a context in which we can bring back and analyze our experiences more carefully and closely, rather than just leaving them in Springfield. And the community placement provides an opportunity to see what we're learning in class, that these are real issues and people, not just abstract situations that we're reading about. The thirty minutes in the car to and from the site also provide a great informal discussion period with my classmates," she said.

Professor Smith remarks that "Students are working with problems that are not on paper. Their actions, and interactions, will have consequences. Their research has an immediacy that is often missing from library research." He finds that his students are deeply engaged by the course materials and research projects, are asking good questions, and appear to be making a significant investment in the course.

"Using CBL, students put their intellect into action," says women's studies professor Martha Ackmann, whose faculty seminar on CBL helped spark this new array of courses. "They are not just learning, but learning to make a difference."

Next semester, new CBL courses to be offered are Lynn Morgan's Anthropology of Reproduction, Debbora Battaglia's Negotiating Identities, Donald Cotter's Environmental Chemistry, and Jim Coleman's Advanced Composition (dance).