Programs: Writing Workshop

Service Projects

Service Learning

What is "Service-Learning"? | Core Components of Service-Learning Courses | How Service-Learning Works in OSU's English Composition Courses | Acquiring Literacy Skills | Works Cited

What is "Service-Learning"?

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but the one thing I know—the only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
—Albert Schweitzer

"We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others."
—Robert Bellah

Service-learning is an effective teaching/learning strategy that "intentionally integrates academic learning and relevant community service." It is an approach that has an emphasis on active rather than passive learning, where students learn and develop through mutually beneficial community service projects that are specifically connected to classroom learning and course objectives. The late Ernest Boyer called service learning a "scholarship of engagement" that promotes the "development of cognitive complexity, citizenship skills, social responsibility, and active learning while responding to pressing issues and needs in the larger society." Service Learning has gained considerable momentum in recent years as colleges and universities are beginning to respond in more visible and direct ways to various needs of their communities. Research in the field has shown that these community/university learning partnerships also benefit student- participants in ways that go beyond the traditional classroom experience.

Service-learning differs from "volunteering" in that programs are structured with discipline-specific pedagogical goals as a foundation for the experience. According to the Faculty Guide to Creating Service Learning Courses at OSU, "Service-learning stresses the importance of reflection and intentional learning through carefully structured, course-based exercises and experiences" that address intellectual, moral, and political goals for social change. On the surface, many service learning classes may simply seem to be a way that universities and teachers enlist a captive audience–namely students–to perform "feel-good" publicity stunts for institutional or scholarly praise and recognition; however, well-designed service learning courses create "win-win" situations where learning and social change are generated not just by theory but by human interaction.

For a brief critical review of service-learning scholarship in composition studies, please see an excerpt of Nancy Pine's dissertation prospectus; a hard copy is on file in the Writing Workshop.

Core Components of Service-Learning Courses

Hands-on, concrete, and practical action of community service work. In these Writing Workshop courses this is tutoring (emergent literacy and ESL) or acting as a magazine editor or coach. *preparation: (1) initial and (2) continual "debriefing"
Theories of social justice and change
- reflection on community service, working toward critical consciousness
- ideas of community and service
- citizenship—social issues (literacy and education)
Explicit connections to Writing Workshop students' literacy practices (reading and writing) and first-year college experience.

Ideas on incorporating these core components into your service-learning classes.

How Does Service Learning Work in OSU's English Composition Classes?

"Community is "a group of people and/or families
who live in the same area (town, suburb, region),
share similar values and interests or beliefs,
are involved in the same school, church, social organization,
support each other physically, emotionally, economically, or spiritually, and/or
work together to achieve a certain goal." —Definition created by English 053, Spring 1996.

Service-learning promotes a number of outcomes that parallel goals outlined in the OSU Writing Workshop's mission statement, chiefly by helping students develop critical thinking skills, by immediately engaging them in the work of the university (inquiry, research, and reporting), by focusing knowledge and experience through various kinds of reflection, and by reframing perspectives through shifting to a more complex and systematic way of looking at problems.

Writing Workshop courses at OSU work in a variety of ways to show students how language and literacy are community-specific (for example, how different university disciplines or communities value and acknowledge certain discourse conventions) and to help them learn to identify and analyze the kinds of language a given discourse community accepts so that they can make conscious decisions about the degree to which they want to conform to or challenge those conventions. According to the "Writing Workshop Mission Statement," its courses "create ‘incentives and contexts for thinking and writing' in the following integrated ways:

by communicating a view of writing and learning as social and collaborative enterprise
by emphasizing meaning-making through theory-building
by valuing student agendas and experiences
by appreciating difference, diversity, and respect for others
by de-centering authority so that students can claim their own voices.

These pedagogical objectives are firmly based in current composition theory and research that argues such contexts promote the best atmosphere for learning and writing."

Service learning sections of Writing Workshop classes, then, underscore the value of community-based, collaborative learning that works for benefits that include–yet go beyond–the individual participant. Currently, service-learning sections of English 110W/193W take the form of literacy partnerships with two Columbus city schools in the University community. In these classes, students spend one class day each week tutoring elementary school students in reading and writing. The experiences with literacy partners serve as work to be brought back and studied in the OSU writing classroom, much like more conventional "print" texts are studied. In the writing class, students practice writing a number of kinds of college-level essay writing, both personal and academic, that focus on issues surrounding literacy and community. These sections of English 110.03/193.03 have provided "attractive versions of first-year writing as students begin the process of becoming successful college readers and writers."

Acquiring Literacy Skills

"Literacy is
The ability to gain access to information
To process information in a variety of ways
To use it in a variety of ways
And to use it to create meaning." —Jacqueline Jones Royster, OSU Faculty
"Literacy and Social Change," Winter 1991.

For most people living in the United Stated at the dawn of the 21st century, "literacy" usually means having the ability to read and to write. However, questions remain: "Reading and writing for whom?" Alternatively, "Reading and writing to what end?" In a broader definition, Jacqueline Jones Royster suggests that "literacy" is more than being able to encode and decode language on paper; instead, it is the ability to gain access to and manipulate information in ways that are meaningful and useful to an individual person or a collective group such as an academic discipline. Royster's definition also encompasses the possibility of a variety of literacies, such as the varied academic discourse communities recognized by David Bartholomae in "Inventing the University." These concepts challenge the traditional, confining notion of a "one-size-fits-all" model such as the one proposed by E.D. Hirsch, where literacy is narrowly defined as being able to read and write about very limited numbers and types of things and where only certain kinds of knowledge are valued. For Hirsch, literacy follows the path of Western Civilization because, he argues, that is the common ground shared by the American people. Unfortunately, Hirsch does not consider the depth and breadth of diversity of language, community and culture that comprise "the American people," and his model serves only to marginalize those whose backgrounds are not white and middle-class.

Royster's and Bartholomae's models of literacy become important when exploring how literacy skills are acquired, what factors may influence whether a person is literate in a given community, and how people can use the idea of multiple literacies to gain access to a wider number of communities, thus promoting greater probability of success within communities of an individual's choosing without devaluing other discourse communities to which that person may belong. This becomes especially important when considering bridges and barriers young children have when they first begin to acquire "school literacy." "Hands-on" tutorials complement more traditional reading, writing, thinking, and discussing of texts and experiences, thus providing practice in the real work of higher education, namely developing and researching questions and reporting insights and information—behaviors essential to solving problems effectively in the "real world." Recognizing that children have already begun to acquire other literacies by the time they begin their formal/school education allow college students an opportunity to explore from an experienced vantage point myths about teaching and learning by comparing their own experiences to their classmates' and to their experiences with their literacy partners at Medary and Trevitt Elementary Schools within the Columbus Public System. Through written and oral reflection, OSU students also have an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding about a number of issues and myths that surround public education in general, how those may be representative of larger social issues, and how imposition of statewide standardized testing can impact—both for good and ill—what students learn about learning.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University."

Hirsch, E.D. "Cultural Literacy."

OSU Service-Learning Scholars Roundtable. "Creating Community Through Service Learning:
A Faculty Guide to Creating Service Learning Courses at The Ohio State University." June 2000.

Rhodes, J.A. and J.P.F. Howard, eds. Academic Service Learning: A pedagogy of action and
reflection. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 73. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 1998.

"Writing Workshop Curricular Objectives," Pre-Quarter Workshop packet, 2001. 9.

"Writing Workshop Mission Statement."