The Guide to Teaching
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Community or Experiential Learning
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)
