The beginnings.

We had our second official faculty learning community meeting yesterday. 
I facilitated a discussion, albeit brief, on 'LEARNING THEORY"  from our "service learning toolkit" book.
We were not clear yet on agenda setting and facilitation, so I was asked to put that together, but the group leaders decided that we will not do that again in the future and they will do the agenda setting.  I think we are getting more clear on roles and all that jazz as a community. 

The agenda I set forth (with everyone's contributions of course):

October 3, 2011 Service learning Faculty Learning Group Meeting

Time: 3-4:30  Central Campus

AGENDA

1.      Ch 1 review with Eric

2.      Ch 2 review with Anneliese

3.      Intro to service learning person: Nicole.  She will introduce herself and show us on line resources

4.      Sharing out syllabi and projects and ideas.

5.      Sharing resources

6.      If time: maybe review timelines of IRB and portfolio’s etc.

We got through agenda topics 1-2 and 3. 

What I got out of the discussion:
1.  MAKE SERVICE LEARNING OPTIONAL.  I have had this as a course requirement and had not considered making it optional.  A colleague said she made it optional and was surprised when more than half her students opted for the service learning component.  I makes me want to think this through and I actually think that this would be fantastic, but I would have to come up with some alternative assignment that would be equally challenging and educative.  It is really hard to think of taking this component out because it actually is a teaching strategy I am trying to teach, as well as build active participating citizens...(DUAL GOAL).  I am not sure this can work.
2.  COLLECT DATA FROM COMMUNITY PARTNERS.  Since I provide the students with places to go, but really have them make the cold calls, and while I do some leg work on building the community partners, I want them to be part of this process...(since they will have to do this when they are teachers), I need a way to really see if the community is being served by their service.  I need to collect some data on this, not only how the students contact them, but then also if the students were helpful. 
3.  REFLECTION:  how we use reflection.  Are we helping students shape their minds with reflection or just letting them have a free for all.  So this got me thinking about protocol with reflection, and how to use it better.  We discussed the example from the book about creating multi-cultural attitudes and helping shape these...and the discussion was around how we frame experiences, and have "preps" (ala DEWEY)  without maybe even acknowledging that we are doing that...and also how I do the "observation/ inference" thing in my class to make sure students are aware of their biases...and how we do this for teaching service, but I do not do this for the service learning component...AND to make sure they are really identifying their own biases and prejudices based on their experiences.
4.  USING the bias thing that one colleague mentioned that assesses people's biases...I really want to get my hands on this.  It is a bias test...she posted this website to check out: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/  Click the demonstration option not the research option for the various tests.