Service Learning, Multicultural Education,
and the Core Curriculum: A Model for Institutional Change
By Sharon Adams, director of the Institute
for Service Learning; Cheryl Ajirotutu, associate professor
of anthropology and associate director of the Cultures
and Communities Program; and Gregory Jay, professor
of English and director of the Cultures and Communities
Program—all at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
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UWM students and community
members
form relationships through the Walnut
Way oral history project. |
Cities like Milwaukee are hubs of international commerce,
scientific inquiry, immigration, and sociocultural exchange,
providing incomparable resources for students to learn
about, and work successfully in, the global communities
of the twenty-first century. As a major public university
located in such a city, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
(UWM) is positioned to create a distinctive learning
environment for students. Wisconsin’s cultures
and communities are rich with resources that can be
brought into our classrooms. At the same time, our classrooms
should extend into our communities so that students
better understand the world they are studying. The program
at UWM can serve as a case study of successful multicultural
service learning for individuals at other schools that
share our access to diverse urban resources and wish
to reformulate traditional pedagogies.
Like most American universities and colleges, UWM has
a token “diversity” requirement: students
must take one three-credit course that focuses on the
experiences, cultural traditions, and worldviews of
African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic/Latino
Americans, and/or Asian Americans. Since most students
pursuing a bachelor’s degree earn a minimum of
120 credits in approximately forty different classes,
this one-class requirement represents the most minimal
of gestures towards multiculturalism and diversity.
Currently there is no campus-wide requirement for community
engagement or service learning. As faculty at UWM, we
wanted to present an alternative to this approach. As
we reflected on the new realities and commitments of
the twenty-first century, two questions stood out:
- Is there a practical way to make meaningful community
engagement part of the core curriculum at a large
research university in the twenty-first century?
- How can multicultural education best prepare students
for engagement with the diversity of the twenty-first-century
world, given the lack of diversity that still characterizes
our campuses?
We responded to these questions by creating the Cultures
and Communities Certificate Program and its Institute
for Service Learning. Together, the program and the
institute offer an alternative general education option
that allows us to mainstream diversity and community
engagement in the core curriculum.
A Model for Diversity and Service Learning
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UWM service learners help plant
a garden in the Walnut Way community. |
The Cultures and Communities Certificate Program allows
undergraduates to fulfill their general education requirements
with a focused set of courses that engage both diversity
and service learning. The program creates a new distribution
of course rubrics (in U.S. and global studies, the arts,
and science and technology), within which multiple classes
carry the Cultural Diversity (CD) accreditation. Students
who complete the certificate are more likely to take
three, four, or even five CD classes. Students are required
to take at least one service-learning class, ensuring
that they experience the pluralism that is Milwaukee.
Academic learning about diversity in the classroom is
tested, expanded, and reflected upon through “real-world”
experiences in the community. Through these experiential
learning contexts, education takes action (appropriately,
this is the motto of the Institute for Service Learning).
The Institute for Service Learning (ISL) assists UWM
faculty in designing the community engagement assignments
for their syllabi and provides logistical support for
student placement and agency relations. From its inception,
ISL sought to act as a bridge between communities, faculty
members, and students, connecting UWM students to Milwaukee’s
social and cultural fabric through their academic course
work and bringing campus resources to local education,
arts, and social service institutions. Initially, UWM
used a community service placement model that focused
primarily on providing service for others. In this model,
a service-learning coordinator connects students with
community sites to perform volunteer service. While
this approach was successful in placing large numbers
of students in service, faculty members were often minimally
engaged with community placement sites, and community
agencies had limited awareness of academic requirements.
Most disconcerting, students were without means for
critical analysis and often processed service-learning
experiences in ways that reinforced racial, ethnic,
and social stereotypes.
Service learning, we came to believe, must be paired
with a multicultural education program that targets
student awareness and focuses attention on structural
inequality, cultural identity, and the historical and
systemic nature of oppression. To give our curriculum
this foundation, we designed a core course that, although
taught across various disciplines, emphasizes these
topics and incorporates service learning as an integral
method of exploring them. To provide historical background,
we chose readings such as Ronald Takaki’s A
Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
that examine the political economy informing the social
construction of race and ethnicity.
We mainstreamed the core course, now called “Multicultural
America,” by inviting departments to design their
own sections in collaboration with us. Today it is offered
in anthropology, English, film, history, sociology,
and women’s studies. This arrangement provides
departments an incentive to offer the course, since
it meets their obligation to offer general education
classes, adds diversity, appeals to younger faculty
and faculty of color, and boosts enrollments.
As the core course evolved, we began to teach about
“whiteness” and white privilege. White student
attitudes of resistance to antiracist or multicultural
education are all too familiar. Often students believe
that America is a place where anyone can succeed by
working hard and playing by the rules, and thus that
people who are poor, illiterate, incarcerated, or trapped
in dead-end jobs “got what they deserved.”
Readings and videos on white privilege take the onus
for antiracism off the students of color and help white
students write reflectively about their service-learning
experience, prompting them to see their own cultural
identities and histories in a critical light. Crucial
to this transformation are the relationships of trust,
communication, and learning developed with people in
the community. These relationships help students discard
old stereotypes through the intercultural understanding
made possible by engagement.
Program Outcomes
The combined curriculum of service learning and diversity
education has measurable outcomes. In a survey conducted
in spring 2006, 89 percent of students reported increased
awareness of community needs; 62 percent felt service
learning had enhanced their understanding of course
content; and 76 percent felt they had increased their
understanding of diverse cultures. Students regularly
testify that service learning transforms and deepens
their academic knowledge. Since many are freshmen or
sophomores, they also find that this experience is vital
to their evaluation of possible career choices and plans
of study, and a number of those surveyed expressed increased
interest in civic service.
By creating a general education program with a focus
on critical multiculturalism and community engagement,
we have revitalized the mission of the university, reconnected
the campus to the world, and reinvigorated the academic
experience of both students and faculty. In uniting
several separate components (multicultural education,
core requirements, service learning, advising, grants
and fellowships, and special program events), and in
positioning the community not as a “problem”
or “deficit,” but rather as co-teacher,
we have formed a new model for engaging students with
diversity and civic affairs.
For full details on these UWM programs, see www.cc.uwm.edu.
| Affiliated
Courses: A Cultural Diversity Curriculum Example |
| In addition
to the core Multicultural America course, over
one hundred affiliated classes, including that
of anthropologist Cheryl Ajirotutu, put the ideals
of the Cultures and Communities Certificate program
into practice. Ajirotutu collaborated with the
residents and board of the Walnut Way community,
a historically black neighborhood in Milwaukee,
to design a course in which students conduct oral
histories of residents, documenting the life of
the neighborhood and contributing to the analytic
history of race relations and urban change in
Milwaukee. Early in the semester, Ajirotutu immerses
her students in the study of anthropological approaches
to oral history and instructs them in the use
of audio and video equipment; students also attend
orientation events in the neighborhood, such as
volunteer sessions where they plant new gardens
in vacant lots. In collaboration with the Walnut
Way advisory board, a series of appointments for
oral interviews is scheduled. Accompanied by an
instructional assistant, students travel to the
homes of residents, who often greet them with
food as well as conversation. Over the course
of the semester they write and revise the oral
histories, thus gaining valuable skills in civic
awareness, intercultural communication, composition,
and critical thinking.
At semester’s end, the course holds two
public forums, one on campus and one in the community,
at which students read the narratives to an audience—including
most of their subjects—to whom they then
present copies of their work. These moving ceremonies
are examples of reciprocal collaboration between
the community and the university and illustrate
how our community partners function as teachers
and sources of knowledge. The products of this
class extend into other courses as well; recently,
faculty and students in the departments of dance
and visual art read the archive of oral histories
from the class. Dance professor Simone Ferro choreographed
a production that was performed by students on
campus and in the community, and artist Raoul
Deal involved his students in creating the backdrop
that served as the scenery for the dance production.
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