C-I and Service-Learning Course Design
Service-learning is an experiential, educational approach that combines the application of course content to address community partner and stakeholders’ needs. It provides progressive, real-world application of what students are learning in the classroom. In many ways and at many stages, C-I fits in with service-learning projects, involving coordinating and collaborating with community partners to fulfill the commissioned needs, conveying ideas and information, updating the client on the status of a project, presenting work to community partners, and considering the best presentation of the work. For the students, it is no longer “just a class assignment,” but rather the project becomes a high-stakes community contribution with heightened expectations. Students will be conversing with others about critical issues, documenting events, and conveying ideas. These projects have real-world value that is tangible to the student, their future endeavors, and results that are potentially long lasting. The community partner or client may represent a future internship or letter of recommendation, so students are more inclined to produce higher quality work and invest in the project more so than assignments that are based on repeating learned information.
Communication-intensive pedagogy comes to play in the overall design of projects, as well as the level of interactions with the clients. Establishing a relationship with the community partners necessitates students to understand the discipline norms, appropriate terminology, and preferred communication channels. Students may have multiple audience interactions that require different communication interactions - should all communication be in technical reports, or a mix of email, teleconferences, and in-person conversations? Service-learning opportunities can be formal interactions with actual community partners, such as PR campaigns or elementary school playground redesign. Projects may also be informal, without specific community partners, like contributing to Wikipedia, public-facing informational blogs, research websites, or PSAs, where the information serves a broad, global community.
Service-learning projects offer potential for peer collaborations, where students can be part of consultant groups to address their community partners’ requests. With peers, students not only are responsible for how they are communicating with the client but also have to practice collaborative communication to ensure the project is a success.
We learn at deeper levels through communication. Communication allows us to make connections with our own understanding or lack thereof, about course content. Communication also allows us to access our peers’ experiences and their perspectives regarding course content. During course-based research projects, students are communicating to learn by making observations, exploring what connections they already have with course material, and converting their observations into testable hypotheses. Simultaneously, we are training our students in the benefits of reflection and the circular process of inquiry. Our students are both developing the sense for best practices of research as well as experiencing the generative results of using communication tools to gain knowledge.