Last Friday afternoon a group of faculty, administrators, and students visited NC A&T to conduct a workshop on Academic Service Learning.
We were invited by Dr. Scott Simkins, the director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at NC A&T, to come over and provide this workshop in hopes that it may spark some growth in this area at their school.
The presentation/discussion focused on three segments, organized around the following questions:
I. What exactly is Academic Service Learning? How does one incorporate it into a class structure? What are specific issues that one should consider prior to taking on this learning experience for both professor and students?
II. What do students think about Academic Service Learning? How does it enrich and/or challenge their learning?
III. What sort of infrastructure is needed in order to facilitate Academic Service Learning on a university campus? In other words, how do we make it happen? There are as many different possibilities as there are universities, most likely, but Elon has a unique relationship between Student Life and the academic side of things that makes our service learning relationships with partner agencies work well.
Presenters included: Angela Lewellyn Jones, Associate Professor of Social Justice; Janice Richardson, Associate Professor of Mathematics & Education; Hal Walker, Associate Professor of Leisure & Sport Management; Jeff Stein, Assistant Dean of Students; Mary Morrison, Director of the Kernodle Service Learning Center. Student presenters, who have collectively participated in more than 1,000 hours of service learning, were Katie Filkins, Matt Kerley, and Wendy Williams.