Faculty & Community Partners Co-Creating Service-Learning

Community engagement and service-learning are critical to the success of higher education (Fitzgerald, Bruns, Sonka, Furco & Swanson, 2012). Service-learning projects should offer an intellectually rich educational experience for students and simultaneously address a community need. Using the Engaged Faculty Institute (EFI) Curriculum, a Service-Learning Institute (SLI) was implemented, giving intentional focus and attention to the collaboration and partnership between the faculty and the community partner. The SLI incorporated a day for the faculty member and the community partner to co-create the service-learning project. This co-creating of the service-learning project is a key element in redistributing power between community and institutional agents, inviting the community partner, not the faculty member, to identify the community needs. Results from pre-and post-surveys, taken by both faculty and community partners will be discussed, focusing on how partnerships were formed and developed, outlining the benefits and pitfalls of co-creating service-learning projects. The results of this case study are encouraging. The pre-post survey data suggests there was an increase in both faculty’s beliefs and skills and their practices. In particular their confidence in the partnerships formed seems high. This is supported by comments from both faculty and community partners after the SLI and after the service-learning project was implemented. The observations also indicate something unique happened in the formation of the partnership during the SLI. One element of the SLI that may explain its success, is the makeup of the team of facilitators. The main organizer of the SLI was a faculty member that had been serving as a provost fellow for community engagement at the institution. That faculty member developed a close relationship with the state Campus Compact executive director through the institution’s membership with Campus Compact. At the start of planning the SLI, the faculty member reached out to the state director, who knew of the EFI, which provided a solid curriculum for the institute. In addition, the institution had a ten-year history and partnership with its local volunteer center. At the very start of planning the SLI, the faculty member also called the executive director of the volunteer center to ask for her participation in planning the SLI. The partnership between Campus Compact, the university and the volunteer center provided the needed expertise to facilitate a powerful experience for faculty and community members. This three-pronged partnership may serve as an ethically sound model of designing service-learning opportunities with outcomes that serve students, faculty and community partners equally