The Guide to Teaching

Community or Experiential Learning

[This file contains the topic statement and all responses. It is intended primarily for printing.]

Topic Statement (Joel Schwartz):

Do you use your community as a basis for experiential learning about how
local government functions. How do you merge this learning/these
experiences with the cognitive learning in the classroom.

For example:

Students who have taken my class in previous semesters act as facilitators
in "reflection sessions" which are conducted throughout the semester. At
these sessions students relate what they are learning what they are
learning in their community service placements to the issues we are
discussing in the classroom.

Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 14:49:58 -0500
From: parker@powernet.net

In my American Government class I require each student to attend one local public meeting of a governmental agency. Here in the Reno-Sparks-Lake Tahoe-Carson City region, there is a wide variety of public meetings available nearly every day, each week and each month. There is no problem finding a meeting near any student's residence. This is put forth as one of their written assignments, to report on who, what, where, and did anything happen in these meetings.

Another assignment is to monitor a political figure, at either the national, state, or local level,
for two months and report on their activities, effectiveness, efforts, achievements and failures.
This to give them some ideal of what politicians really do and how difficult it is, sometimes, to
judge their actions based on limited exposure and momentary sound bites in the media.

At the same time, I have guest speakers come in and tell of their experiences dealing with
government at the state level; lobbying for increased funding for programs, opposing legislative efforts, encouraging activeism within the system, etc.

I try to show, in the course of my lectures, the inter-relationship and the similarities between
national, state, and local government. Hopefully, some of my students will finish the class with
a hightened awareness of what they, as individuals and in groups, can do to promote better
government and services.

Jerry Parker

Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 20:04:58 CST
From: KOZ <kozlowij@uwwvax.uww.edu>

Here at UW-Whitewater we take a different approach. All Political Science majors are
required to attend threee political events each year. These can be speeches, government agency
meetings, campaign rally, etc. They must then briefly write up and turn in their event. We got
the idea from the music department which requires its majors to attend a certain number of
concerts and recitals.

John Kozlowicz

Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 12:57:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Joel J Schwartz <jjschwar@email.unc.edu>

The community offers an abundance of opportunities for student experiential learning.
Organizing such opportunities requires a considerable expenditure of faculty time, but the
rewards which accrue to students more than compensate for this effort.

Internships and community service placements in public policy and local and state politics are
easy to integrate with the cognitive learning that goes on in the classroom. While public policy
is made at the federal and state level, its administration and implementation occurs at the local
level. Students who have a particular policy interest could, for example, do internships in those county and city agencies responsible for monitoring the success and/or failure of these policies and programs. Students might also survey the agency's clients or public for opinions which focus on these programs and how they, the clients or public, view and respond to local
officials with whom they must interact.

A different kind of community learning might involve student observations of local and state
decision-making at local school boards, county commissioners' meetings, the justice system,
and, if distance permits, state legislative assemblies.

Courses on political parties and election campaigns could require students to work part-time
for the political party of their choice and conduct both pre-voting and post-voting telephone or
exit surveys in an election year.

A more personalized experience could involve students researching local, state, or
congressional political figures for several months and then reporting on their political style,
constituency service strategies, their effectiveness in building bridges between the voters and
policy outcomes, etc. Students could then share these intense and continuous observations with
the class so as to give greater depth and insight into the reality of politics and policy making.

A curriculum-wide approach could require all political science majors, at some point during
their undergraduate education, to attend three or more political events a year. These could be
extremely varied in nature. To insure that this requirement is fulfilled the department would
expect each student to summarize the events and to indicate how their observations helped them to understand, in the words of Tip O'Neill, "all politics is local politics."

These represent just a few of the community-based learning possibilities that already do occur
in connection with political science classes. The key to their success is not only careful
advanced planning so that students know how and where to find political activity which is all
around them, but it is essential that the experiential learning be continuously merged with the
cognitive classroom learning so that each enriches the other.

Community and service-learning will not be appropriate for all courses and all instructors.
Finding placements and internships, keeping track of students and integrating community
service and course materials will take a considerable amount of time and planning. In addition,
it is possible that logistical problems will arise, especially if this is one's first experience with
service-learning. A lot of leg work has to be done from the outset in selecting and working with the agencies. I know sudents who have said that doing their community service project or
internship really taught them more, and had a more lasting imprint on their personal and
intellectual development than anything else they did in the university.

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Teaching Politics is published by William J. Ball (ball@tcnj.edu)