Madison Community Organizations and Service Learning

Randy Stoecker

Rough Draft

Introduction

This research presents the service learning experiences of 67 staff members representing 64 Madison area small and medium sized community nonprofit organizations. In contrast to school systems, government departments, and large nonprofits, small to medium nonprofits have the fewest resources to waste on service learning that is not useful. In some ways, they also have the most to gain, as a few highly effective service learners can have a profound effect on the organization’s capacity. Thus we chose to focus on these organizations.

Potential Problems with Service Learning

Service learning has now become an institutionalized practice in higher education. From small community colleges to the most prestigious Ph.D. granting institutions, the practice of sending students out to communities that are defined as disadvantaged has become a part of the curriculum and even the requirements of an increasing number of higher education institutions.

Since the late 1990s, there has been growing dissatisfaction among many people both inside and outside of the service learning movement. In the worst cases we saw poor communities exploited as free sources of student education (Eby, 1998). In the next worst cases we became concerned that the "charity" form of service learning was reinforcing students’ perceptions of poor communities as helpless (Kahne and Westheimer, 1996; Brown, 2001 Marullo and Edwards, 2000, Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2000), and that the connection between what was happening in the classroom and what was happening in the community was tenuous at best.

These perceived problems with service learning might be traced to its origins in the 1980s, influenced by liberal faculty who were distressed by the increasing conservatism of their students. They believed that finding ways of confronting students with actual poor people would help reverse the trend, and the focus of service learning on changing students, rather than changing communities, was born. This bias in focus has continued to this day, where the research on student outcomes of service learning is voluminous (Ward and Wofl-Wendel, 2000), and there is much lip service paid to the importance of community outcomes (Jones, 2003; Kellogg Commission, 1999; Campus Compact, 1999), but there are only a handful of studies that look at community impact and community perceptions of service learning (Cruz and Giles, 2000). And while Cruz and Giles (2000) attribute the lack of research on community outcomes of service learning to theoretical and methodological problems, it is equally plausible that the neglect of community impacts is a result of the bias in service learning to focus on serving and changing students, creating a self perpetuating cycle.

This research seeks to at least partially redress that neglect. Using a project-based research methodology (Stoecker, 2005), we will explore how community organization staff define, manage, and evaluate the effectiveness of service learning.

A Paucity of Past Research

What do we know about community reactions to service learning? Not much. The little bit of research that is available shows that community organizations are relatively satisfied with the outcomes from the service that they receive (Vernon and Ward, 1999; Ferrari and Worrall, 2000; Birdsall, n.d.). For the most part, however, the research on satisfaction has remained at a relatively superficial level, using Likert-scale questionnaires or focus groups.

One of the few studies that focused in-depth on community perceptions of service learning, surveying 65 rural nonprofit organization directors and then conducting follow- up interviews with 30 of them, found that the directors were overwhelmingly pleased with their service learning outcomes. However, they also found that student schedules, short-term commitment, and training needs created challenges, which were compounded by lack of communication with their supervising faculty (Vernon and Ward, 1999). This issue of communication between community and academy also appears in other research by Birdsall (n.d.) and Jones (2003).

As far as we know, this concern with a lack of communication is more of an issue for the community organization than for the faculty in charge of service learning students, partly because organizations are uncertain about faculty expectations and believe knowing those expectations are important for effectively deploying and supervising service learners. Indeed, so out of the loop are some organizations that they define service learning as community service (Birdsall, n.d.), not understanding that the service is supposedly connected to course content, learning objectives, and grading. As a possible stopgap to some of the communication problems, Bushouse (2005), based on interviews with 11 organizations, found that using a memorandum of understanding helped to better orient the organizations in regard to what was possible from students and also allowed them to better judge their opportunity costs in taking on students.

There is also some suggestion that there are important cultural differences between the community and academy. Bacon (2002), using separate focus groups of community organization staff and faculty, identified a cultural divide between community organizations and those on the university side of the relationship. In short, community organization staff are more willing to view themselves as learners, to link learning to action, and to see learning as a collective activity. This has important implications for how supervising faculty and community organizations communicate with each other. Jones (2003) argues in fact that communities are often not recognized as having their own expertise to offer in the relationship. And Birdsall (n.d.) notes that community organizations often see service learning as a means for recruiting students for continued work after the formal service learning appointment concludes, a motivation not often taken into account in the design of service learning programs.

The final suggested theme emerging from the literature on community reactions to service learning concerns the unequal relationship between community and academy. Jones (2003) suggests that much service learning will be initiated by the institutions, but the burden of managing the service learning students will fall disproportionally on community organizations hosting the students. The exception to this may be that community organizations experience a more equal relationship with tribal, historically Black, and Hispanic serving higher education institutions (Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2000).

Our research goes beyond these suggested issues to take a much deeper look at how community organizations define, perceive and evaluate service learning. In doing so, we will look at seven themes: community organization staff definitions of service learning, ways of connecting with service learners, reactions to different service learning structures, managing service learners, diversity issues in service learning, communication and relationship issues in service learning, and indicators of success.

Method

This research was conducted using a project-based research approach. After an informal listening project conducted by Randy Stoecker, hearing some of the concerns of community organizations about the way that service learing was being implemented in Madison, Wisconsin, he organized a focus group of about 20 community organization staff. The focus group confirmed that there were some issues that organization staff would like to see addressed. Seven participants from that focus group agreed to participate in forming a core group to guide the research process. The research was designed jointly by the core group members, members of a student seminar, and two faculty researchers. We agreed to identify the entire population of small to medium size community organizations (defining that roughly as less than $1 million annual budget and/or twelve or fewer full-time staff) who had hosted service learning students. We used a broad definition of service learning that included any student performing any service for a small to medium size community organization for credit. That included some students that may more accurately be considered interns or practicum students, but doing so also allowed us to compare community organization staff reactions to different types of student placements.

Using lists obtained from the service learning offices at the three higher education institutions in Madison, and from other regular sources of service learning at the University of Madison not networked through the Morgridge Center for Public Service, we ultimately identified a population of 101 organizations that received service learning. We requested one-hour interviews with each organization, explaining that the interviews would cover the seven topics mentioned above. Some organizations refused based on their belief that they had been erroneously identified as having service learners. Others refused because their volunteer coordinator or other staff who managed service learning had either recently left or recently arrived. Most, however, refused citing time constraints. A small number initially agreed to be interviewed but then did not keep their appointments.

The students ended up conducting 67 in-depth interviews with representatives of 64 organizations, from which they wrote partial transcripts on the sections of the interviews covering the main topics. We returned the transcripts to the people we interviewed for validity checks. Students then broke into two to three person teams and each team coded the interviews for a single topic. The team coding allowed for some qualitative inter-rater reliability, but since we were not looking for specific statements but were following a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), we did not conduct strict inter-rater reliability scoring.