The Problem of Time: Enabling Students to Make Long-Term Commitments to Community-Based Learning

Abstract

Colleges and communities structure differently. They endeavor to engage the attention and effort of their members on schedules that are responsive to different needs and values. These differences create tensions and challenges in service-learning partnerships between colleges and community organizations. Roughly speaking, community organizations face a of molding into a coherent and continuing unity the capacities of student volunteers which the college calendar and the college curriculum tend to chop into fragments. I call this the problem of time in service-learning partnerships. In this paper I tell and draw lessons from the story of how one campus-community service-learning partnership--the Jane Addams School for Democracy in partnership with the University of Minnesota and the College of St. Catherine--has experienced and responded to this problem. In the first section, I give a general characterization of the problem. In Section Two, I recount how the Jane Addams School began, including its initial strategy for solving the problem. In Section Three, I tell how the School evolved and how its initial strategy for solving the failed. And in the final section, I review the lessons the School learned from the failure and its new strategy for solving it. The Problem of Short Stays in the Community Let me begin with an anecdote that Herman Blake tells about Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School. (1) The Highlander Folk School is an adult education center, located in Tennessee, which was founded in the 1930's by Horton and two colleagues, Don West and James Dombrowski. It played an important supportive role in movements for social justice in the South--the industrial union movement of the 1930's and the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. Rosa Parks participated in a two-week workshop at Highlander in the summer of 1955; she refused to give up her seat on the bus in December 1955 (See Horton, 1997). In the late 1960's Herman Blake was on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz and was looking for good internship opportunities for students. Blake had worked in the civil rights movement, had been at Highlander, knew Horton and knew of Highlander's involvement working with communities on environmental issues. He asked Horton, then the Executive Director of Highlander, if students from Santa Cruz could come and do internships at Highlander. Yes, Horton replied, we will be glad to have them, provided that they stay with us for two years. Two years, otherwise, forget it and stay home! What would lead a community-centered organization to take this stance? From the point of view of a community organization, how does the prospect look of having student volunteers? For most community organizations that partner with colleges and universities in service-learning, the presence of students is a decidedly mixed blessing. On the positive side, the students constitute a large pool of volunteers, many of them highly motivated, who bring new energy, viewpoints and ideas to the organization. On the negative side, the students tend to stay in their service jobs for only the ten to fifteen weeks of the service-learning course. The student leaves the organization just as he or she is coming to understand its mission and philosophy and is becoming competent and comfortable in helping with its work. When the next quarter or semester rolls around, the organization has to orient and train a whole new group of student workers. Another negative is that students may come to the community organization expecting to apply, in some direct way, what they are learning in the service-learning course that brings them to the setting. Trying out an academic theory is then students' main interest. They are in the setting only through the screen of the theory. What a community organization needs, in contrast to this narrow presence, is for students to be fully present as whole persons to the full complexity of the organization and its people. …