By Amy Campbell

When President John F. Kennedy challenged young Americans to ask what they could do for their country, many college campuses were ivory towers students had to leave in order to answer the call. Less than 50 years later, college students are serving their communities while getting class credit, through an increasingly popular teaching initiative known as academic service learning.

Academic service learning, or ASL, integrates hands-on community service with in-class readings, writing and discussion. At Adrian College, professors in the psychology department and the sociology, criminal justice and human services department have embraced ASL, and are winning awards for their efforts. Michigan Campus Compact (MCC), an association of universities and colleges that promotes citizenship through service, has presented a faculty/staff Community Service-Learning Award to an AC professor in three of the last four years.

Students say ASL is a great way to get practical experience and make a difference. Brian Sills, 21, a junior majoring in criminal justice, is well acquainted with ASL. So far, he has worked at the Maurice Spear Campus (a juvenile detention facility), assisted with a probate court study on the effects of Lenawee County's Boys & Girls Club, and sponsored a class at the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility, all as part of Adrian College classes.

"There's really nothing I don't like about service learning," he says.

Dr. William Tregea, professor of sociology/criminal justice/human services and a year 2000 recipient of the MCC award, says Sills' attitude is typical.

"Students love service learning," Tregea says. "It gets them engaged. It makes them part of something meaningful."

Tregea says he became interested in academic service learning in 1998, after attending an ASL workshop at which his colleague, Dr. Judith Hammerle, received the MCC award for her service learning efforts. Tregea realized service learning could introduce his students to criminal justice agencies and grass roots crime-fighting techniques seldom portrayed in the media.

"When I came to Adrian College in 1997, there weren't any ASL sites for criminal justice majors," he says. "I did place students in existing internships, but I wanted my newly declared sophomore majors to get some experience earlier in their careers."

Tregea's own activism helped establish the ASL sites he needed. Through his involvement with Adrian's East Side Community Coalition (ESCC), he was instrumental in the creation of Lenawee County's Boys & Girls Club, the Adrian Police-Community Deliberation Board and a post-GED education program for prison inmates, all of which have since served as academic service learning sites.

The inmate education program at the Gus Harrison Correctional Facility gives students a rare look at life behind prison walls. Kristy Bush, a sophomore majoring in criminal justice and psychology, could have done her ASL assignment at the Boys & Girls Club, but opted for the prison instead.

"It sounded interesting," she says with a smile. "The first day I was really nervous because I didn't know what to expect. But once I got in there, they were really considerate, and really appreciative of us being there."

Being there is the most important aspect of Bush's ASL assignment; the inmate-taught class could not be held without a sponsor from the "outside." Though little is required of sponsors during the class, Bush believes her time there will make a difference for the inmates down the road.

"The way I look at it, it's not really fair to put them in [prison] and not give them any opportunities to change," she says.

Brian Sills, a GED class sponsor, agrees.

"I know it's a good cause," he says, "and if even one of these guys can pass the GED, that's a good outcome."

Both Sills and Bush are so committed to the program they've agreed to continue their sponsorships beyond the time required by Tregea.

"My class was supposed to be done a couple of weeks ago, but I volunteered to stay until the end of the [school] year," Bush says. "They just got an understanding of the basic math they need to know, and I just felt really bad about leaving them."

Fostering that kind of concern is one of the aims of ASL, according to Dr. Judith Hammerle, professor of psychology.

"I have two goals for students that have nothing to do with what they're physically doing," she says. "One is that they learn empathy, and the other is that they see that these people are more like us than not."

Hammerle uses ASL in her abnormal psychology class, requiring service at sites including the Maurice Spear Campus, Lenawee Therapeutic Riding and the Catherine Cobb Domestic Violence Shelter. Because Hammerle hopes service learning will expose students to disorders they might only read about, her ASL requirements are well-defined and hands-on.

"Service at the agency that doesn't involve contact with clients is allowed, but only a small part of it can be that way," she says. "I require students to be in contact with clients for it to be considered service learning."

At the beginning of their assignments, Hammerle's students complete a goals and objectives inventory detailing what they want to learn from the experience and how they plan to achieve those goals. A service learning summary, completed at the end of their required hours, addresses whether they achieved their aims and how.

Because abnormal psych applies to a variety of fields, students can tailor the required service to their individual interests and academic majors. One criminal justice major chose to work at the Maurice Spear Campus and identified goals including, "Learn the range of offenses that would get a person placed in a detention center," and "Learn about the backgrounds of the clients and how their families and environments played a role in their wrong behaviors." In the student's summary, completed about six weeks later, he illustrated how he accomplished his goals and gave a "thumbs up" to his assignment. "I think this project was better than a typical term paper, because nothing compares to seeing and doing things first-hand," he wrote, adding, "This project gave me a better insight into the text."

That kind of enhanced academic learning is one of ASL's three criteria. Meaningful service to the community and purposeful civic learning must also take place in classes practicing true service learning. Dr. Agnes Caldwell, assistant professor of sociology and recipient of MCC's 2001 award, says it is these criteria that differentiate ASL from traditional volunteer projects and internships.

"ASL is very clear in that you're deliberately trying to take concepts and theories, link it to the service, link it to the class, link it to projects to feed back into the grade," she says.

Caldwell made service learning part of her Race and Ethnicity class after students expressed an interest in trying to solve the societal problems they'd been studying.

"I had students write on evaluations that while this course was fascinating to talk about, they thought there were things they could do about these issues, and they didn't feel like they had an opportunity," Caldwell says. "There was this sense of, can't we really do something?"

Caldwell added academic service learning to her next Race and Ethnicity class by teaming up with Cambios, Inc., an Adrian-based organization that seeks to fight racism by exposing children to stories about other cultures. Caldwell learned about the group from Brandy Bishop, a junior majoring in human services who discovered Cambios while looking for an internship site. After volunteering as a reader herself, Caldwell knew the organization would be a perfect fit for ASL.

Caldwell's students read to elementary school classes twice a week, and led discussions on the books' ideas and themes. But the enthusiasm of both the Adrian College and elementary students sometimes took the project beyond its required parameters.

"About 50 percent of the [Race and Ethnicity] class started to do activities around the book, in conjunction with the teacher," Caldwell says. She added that the AC students' presence in the elementary classes served more than one purpose.

"Some teachers wanted college students in the classroom as mentors on a whole bunch of different levels, not just race and ethnicity," she says. "There are some schools in Adrian where children don't think they can go to college, so there was some powerful role modeling going on."

Bishop, who has continued working with Cambios as an intern, experienced that first hand.

"The way they looked up to you, it just... boosted you," she says. "That's why I think this program is so important. The interaction between the readers and the kids is phenomenal. It's the greatest feeling."

Just as the college students' involvement can serve multiple purposes for organizations, sometimes the most profound lessons are also the simplest. Of her work at the Catherine Cobb Domestic Violence Shelter, Bishop said, "I would never have thought that in Lenawee County we'd have such a big need for something like this. Bigger cities, yeah. But [the Cobb Shelter] was always full."

Professors using ASL report a tendency for students to continue working with their organizations beyond the required hours. Like the students at the prison, Bishop extended her time at the Cobb Shelter.

"We were required to do ten hours, and I did more than ten hours because it was so enjoyable," she says. "Working with the kids at the shelter, it just grabbed me."

Proponents say students in all disciplines can be "grabbed" by service learning, and at Adrian College, students in departments outside the social sciences are starting to be exposed to ASL. Dr. Donald Cellini, professor of modern languages and cultures, has used service learning with his advanced Spanish class, having students provide much-needed translations for Lenawee United Way.

"We translated form letters, invitations, brochures," he says. "At times the vocabulary was technical and a real challenge for students and teacher. We learned together."

In another class, Cellini's students tutored Spanish-speaking high school students.

"Adrian High School found itself with seven monolingual Spanish students and not enough English-as-a-second-language support," he says. "Since the high school students spoke little English, [my] students had to explain history, biology or math in Spanish." Cellini says the AC tutors were much appreciated by the high school, and got a confidence boost from discovering they could readily communicate with native Spanish speakers.

This is just one example. Tregea says appropriate sites and projects can be developed in any discipline, and believes ample ASL opportunities can be an asset in student recruitment.

"A college with more service learning is more attractive to some students," he says.

Brandy Bishop, who transferred to AC from Jackson Community College, is one of them.

"Service learning has been an important part of my experience at Adrian College," she says. "It's made it more meaningful."

- Freelance writer Amy Campbell is the former public relations director at Adrian College.