Engaging Vital Older Adults in Intergenerational Service-Learning

The population of older adults within the United States is growing rapidly, which calls for increased understanding of that population. However, ageism is pervasive and one of the most engrained forms of prejudice. Intergenerational service-learning may be one way to reduce negative stereotypes and ageism. The Co-Mentoring Project is an intergenerational service-learning project that matches undergraduate students and vital older adult volunteers. Students meet with their partners at least four times over the course of the semester to conduct a life review and gather information to begin the older adults' memoirs. This chapter provides a rationale for intergenerational service-learning and information about its theoretical underpinnings. The chapter also offers information about service-learning best practices, including structured reflection, and how the Project's methodology is consistent with them. The multi-modal assessment conducted for the Project and its outcomes are discussed. Finally, directions for future research are described.

Refugee Families and Undergraduate Nursing Service-Learning

This chapter describes a service-learning partnership between two refugee resettlement agencies and a school of nursing. The partnership has successfully completed its goals of both service and learning over many semesters to the present. This community-based learning opportunity has entailed a variety of health interventions with refugee families while the learning has involved essential competencies of cross-cultural nursing, insights into social determinants of health, and developing confidence in being able to problem solve in a complex mix of health, social systems, poverty, language, and cultural barriers. In addition, assignments connected with this community engagement have encouraged students to develop an awareness of global health issues while intervening locally with their assigned refugee family, thus thinking and acting globally. The authors will discuss lessons learned from this long-term relationship and suggested directions for future work.

Writing Partners

This chapter describes and analyzes a writing assignment, an oral history project, developed for a college-level service-learning composition class. In bridging the writer with a single community partner and inviting the pair to jointly compose a memoir, this assignment can create a successful service-learning experience by engaging students and community members in projects that are beneficial and hold important personal, social, and political implications. The chapter also considers how the project, up to this point used successfully in local service communities, might fare in international service learning contexts.

Lawrence2College

High school graduation and college access are critical vehicles for individuals' social mobility and for community change. This chapter provides an overview of Lawrence2College, a culturally engaging service-learning partnership which was initiated in 2014 and focuses on these issues. Lawrence2College facilitates high school achievement and college awareness through a mentoring and support program which connects students from Lawrence High School, a public school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with graduate and undergraduate students from Merrimack College, a private, Catholic college in neighboring North Andover. Lawrence is a city in Massachusetts with a strong Latinx presence, including recent immigrants. Poverty and low literacy are challenges faced by residents. This chapter explains the rationale and conceptual underpinnings of Lawrence2College and describes its evolution and approaches. The chapter concludes with insights and recommendations for practice and research.

Don't Touch My Hair

Myriad studies on service-learning agree on the benefits of service-learning for students. Because projects are designed with the needs of students and institutions in mind, the experiences of the Black communities served are seldom highlighted nor are the intricacies of the multiple relationships addressed. Voices of marginalized groups especially the Black communities—the community that is the focus of this chapter—needs to be incorporated in authentic and intentional ways to advance transformational service-learning for all involved. This chapter begins to examine issues and opportunities for best case scenarios for service-learning projects in Black communities.

Partnering With LGBTQ+ Communities

What issues and considerations are involved in developing and facilitating service-learning projects with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities? This chapter presents results of examining the limited scholarship on service-learning projects conducted with these communities. The author proposes possible reasons for the lack of scholarship and offers suggestions for pre-, during-, and post-project considerations. These suggestions include identifying and surveying potential collaborators, preparing students for engaging with the communities, facilitating reflection during the project, and debriefing students afterward, along with analyzing results in order to improve future collaboration efforts.

Social Ecology of Engaged Learning

This chapter presents a community-university partnership model of service-learning with urban, low income, middle school youth of color focused on promoting agency and efficacy through an All Star Anti-violence Youth Summit. The summit combined basketball and small group activities to define, analyze, and address the issue of gun violence in the community. The approach is intergenerational and intercultural, and was implemented through a semester long Civic Engagement service-learning class. The diverse group of students at a large, urban, public University applied the concepts of critical service-learning, British Social Action, positive youth development, and civic engagement.

“What Am I Doing Here?”

Creating and maintaining meaningful, educational, and culturally engaging service learning partnerships between Asian American studies programs and Asian American community-based organizations (CBOs) is both challenging and rewarding. The Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University was founded in partnership with both student organizations and community-based organizations, and has sought to maintain the promise to bring university resources and knowledge into the community, while bringing community resources and wisdom into the university through a variety of campus-community partnerships. This study reviews that history in order to contextualize current relationships and practices within institutionally structured community service-learning (CSL) designated courses. A survey of students, community organization partners, and faculty engaged with Asian American service-learning in the San Francisco Bay Area reveals the benefits and challenges of culturally engaged service-learning, suggestions for best practices, and future directions.

Challenged by Respect

This chapter explores how service-learning programs offered by U.S. colleges and universities might partner with Native American communities on reservations. It reviews relevant scholarship on approaches to cross-cultural learning, such as the Authentic and Culturally Engaging (ACE). It provides background for the participating partners in a current service-learning program. It examines issues affecting cross-cultural service-learning on reservations in light of ongoing historical, social and cultural trauma. It addresses pedagogical issues unique to Humanities (Religion) service-learning programs. It provides a description of various strategies used in the program that implement service-learning and learning theories. Throughout the chapter Native American voices and scholars serving as community partners for this specific program offer critical perspectives on pedagogy and partnerships.

“I See Myself in Them”

This chapter explores a first-year ethnic studies course to highlight the importance of engaging the diversity within the classroom in relation to the diverse communities being served. Students participating in this course are self-identified Students of Color, many of whom are first generation college students, from lower socioeconomic communities. Introducing a Critical Race Service-Learning framework, the authors highlight how Students of Color in this course learn about race, class, gender, language, citizenship status, phenotype, sexuality, etc. to challenge the status quo while also actively engaging in service-learning with/in diverse communities as an empowering pedagogy. Findings indicate the foundational tools learned within the course pushed students to speak back to the educational inequities they witnessed at their service sites and experienced in K-12 to further empower them to continue giving back to their communities beyond college.