How do you encourage college students to get
involved in the community? How do you ignite
their potential for collaboration and equip them for a life of civic
engagement? To address these questions,
I’ve participated as one of eight instructors in a new experimental course we
collectively designed and taught at the University of Minnesota Rochester this
past academic year. We’ve called it the Community Collaboratory, or “Co-Lab” for short, as a way of
suggesting the content at a glance. With
guidance from the team of instructors, students work in groups with
influential members of Rochester organizations, whom we’ve called “community
advisors,” to discuss areas of need and draw up at the end of the semester a
proposal of practical ideas for collaboration.
Our main purpose is to create and facilitate a reciprocal relationship
between the education goals of the university and the specific objectives of
community institutions. We’ve formed
this partnership largely with medical organizations because UMR students are
majoring in health science. Co-Lab
was an overall success this past semester and is now a required course in the university curriculum,
replacing an earlier attempt to integrate service learning into the fourth semester
of Spanish. However, creating a course
that could meet the high expectations of the faculty and staff involved, let alone offering the community advisors something worth their time and getting the chancellor's stamp of approval, was
no small chore.
The team of volunteer instructors had assembled
by the beginning of the fall semester and met in early October to bounce around
ideas and think big thoughts. Here was an
opportunity to do something meaningful and different, and with the full backing
of the university. Consequently, we
wanted to approach this project with great care, even if the timetable was
pressing upon us to offer this course in the spring of 2013. Fortunately, the faculty and staff who have
been a part of Co-Lab are a rather congenial and easy-going bunch, so
arriving at a common vision was less problematic than it otherwise could have
been. Our diversity in terms of academic
discipline, teaching experience, and personality is both a strength and
challenge. It was a strength precisely
because we wanted an interdisciplinary curriculum that considered community
involvement from different angles. The
challenge involved finding a curriculum that satisfied academic requirements of
the university and also integrated topics, concepts, and skills that we
individually thought was important. It
wasn’t lost on us that the credibility of a course about collaboration hinges
on the ability of the course designers to collaborate successfully! In the end, the real challenge stemmed from our
ambition to create an innovative interdisciplinary hybrid course that
links the university to the wider community.
After the initial meeting, we gathered together on a
bi-weekly basis throughout the fall semester to work out the
details and put together a syllabus. We formed breakoff groups to
explore different aspects of the course, such as course texts and assignments. Some of us took on the nuts-and-bolts task of
forging a workable syllabus, while others brainstormed ways we could include community organizations. We explored the theoretical roots of our
endeavor by reading relevant scholarly
articles on community engagement and related topics and discussing them in our
meetings. We knew that this course would
be worth three credits and entail a letter grade, unlike other non-discipline
offerings at UMR. Since the spring
schedule would only allow the course to meet for one 75-minute session per
week, we needed to find a way to make up the missing credit hours. We ended up creating a hybrid course: part of
the course would occur in the classroom and part online. The online component mostly consisted of a weekly
discussion forum where students address questions from the course texts, post
assignments, and sometimes follow up on discussion from class. We divided the course into three modules,
each of which require a major assignment, in addition to the online forum and
class activities. These assignments
include participation in a community event with a follow-up report; a narrative
on citizenship; a group recommendation for future collaboration; and a
presentation. The instructors paired up to plan and teach each weekly session,
which I’ll discuss below. Critical to
the course was a mandatory Community Collaboratory Conference about six weeks
into the semester where students met in their assigned group with their respective community advisor in a structured
discussion format.
We didn’t want this course to be merely about “service
learning,” and in fact wanted to forge new terms to avoid these
associations. There’s nothing wrong with
service learning, but we wanted to widen the angle and have students make
larger connections. This course was not
about volunteering on a short-term basis.
We wanted them to understand the complicated so that they could come out
of the course with a knowledge of complex social issues that can enhance or
hinder community collaboration as well as a set of communicative, social and
research skills to facilitate this work.
To use the well-worn cliché, we didn’t want to give them a fish but
teach them how to fish. Having the
students work in groups and work through these larger issues was particularly
important for this first offering of the course. In subsequent semesters we will recalibrate the
curriculum. For the upcoming fall
semester, for instance, students taking the course will not be starting from
scratch but building upon the recommendations that last semester’s students
presented...
We wanted to do something special for the first session of the semester in order to set the tone and make the course a different experience, so we had the students assemble at the civic theater instead of the classroom and invited both the theater director and the chancellor to speak about opportunities for collaboration in Rochester. After giving a brief overview of the course and introducing the instructors, we explained the Social Change Wheel to the students (see image) and asked them where they would place themselves on it.
We wanted to do something special for the first session of the semester in order to set the tone and make the course a different experience, so we had the students assemble at the civic theater instead of the classroom and invited both the theater director and the chancellor to speak about opportunities for collaboration in Rochester. After giving a brief overview of the course and introducing the instructors, we explained the Social Change Wheel to the students (see image) and asked them where they would place themselves on it.
