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Service Learning in the Curriculum: Examining a Media Literacy Project.

Raul Reis

California State University, Long Beach

Abstract:

This paper aims to measure the efficacy of a service-learning course focused on media literacy. The main goal of the paper is to help colleagues who are involved in the development of service-learning projects. The research questions revolve around the effects of service learning on college students as well as on community members. In order to answer those questions and relate them to the critical issues raised by previous studies, my research focused on understanding the experiences and perspectives of the university and elementary school students directly involved in the project.

Introduction

In the spring of 1999 and again in 2000, students at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) participated in a service-learning project that placed them as coordinators and facilitators of a media literacy course for elementary school students. Employing a nationally used media literacy curriculum, CSUMB students brought the discussion about issues such as media violence, gangs, school violence, gun control, and media awareness to fifth- and sixth-graders at César Chavez Elementary School (CCES), a new, technology-enhanced school serving the mainly Hispanic population of East Salinas, California.1

That service-learning project was groundbreaking and innovative on many different levels, from the way it fully integrated educational and community partners to the way in which the specific class curriculum was designed and implemented. Even for CSUMB, a school in which service learning is completely integrated into each of the majors and in which almost half of its student body was involved in service-learning experiences in the 1998-1999 academic year, the César Chavez Media Literacy project was unique. This project was one of the first initiatives to integrate service learning and media literacy, using public schools as the site to explore the intersection of those pressing, contemporary issues. The project's relevance is made even more apparent because of tragic events in Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Louisiana, and other communities across the country, which brought the issues of youth and school violence to the top of the public agenda.

This article discusses this particular service-learning project by examining its planning and implementation stages and by assessing some of its results. The main goal of the paper is to help colleagues who have developed or who are thinking about developing service-learning projects. I want to describe and interpret the experience in a way that makes it useful as a future reference for instructors, community partners, and students alike. The César Chavez Media Literacy project is analyzed from the perspectives of the university students involved and the elementary school students directly affected by it.

Service Learning

Definitions

How does one define "service learning"? The popularization of service learning and its widespread adoption by educational institutions has produced a wide variety of definitions. Educators, administrators, faculty, and researchers involved in those learning initiatives have tried to provide their own definitions of the term, often by comparing it to better-known and less controversial activities, such as volunteerism and community service.

One of the best, most concise and encompassing definitions of service learning comes from Communications for a Sustainable Future, a University of Colorado-based educational organization. "At its heart," they write, "service learning is a form of experiential learning that employs service as its modus operandi" (1999, p. 1). The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) offers a more specific definition of service learning as an "instructional methodology [that] integrates community service with academic instruction as it focuses on critical, reflective thinking and civic responsibility" (1999, p. 1).

The government-sponsored Commission on National and Community Service (CNCS) offered one of the most widely accepted definitions of service learning. As quoted in Belbas, Gorak, and Shumer, the National and Community Service Act of 1990 states that service-learning programs provide an educational experience

  • under which students learn and develop through active participation in … thoughtfully organized service experiences that meet actual community needs;
  • that is integrated into the students' academic curriculum or provides structured time for a student to think, talk, or write about what the student did and saw during the service activity;
  • that provides students with opportunities to use newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-life situations in their own communities; and
  • that enhances what is taught in school by extending student learning beyond the classroom and into the community and helps foster the development of a sense of caring for others.
(quoted in Belbas, Gorak, and Shumer, 1993, p. 1)

Several other authors have stressed the reciprocal link between community and school. Furco, for example, developed an experiential education typology or spectrum that classifies service learning, community service, volunteerism, field education, and internships according to two main criteria: intended beneficiaries of the activity, and emphasis on service and/or learning (1996, p. 2). While internships, for instance, tend to benefit primarily the provider (i.e., the student) and focus on learning, volunteerism, at the other end of the spectrum, tends to focus on service and benefit the recipient (i.e., the community organization). According to Furco's typology, by integrating service and learning and benefiting both providers and recipients equally, service learning achieves a "happy median" in the scale he devised (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Distinctions among Service Programs (Furco, 1996, p. 3)

Furco's typology is mirrored by the distinctions Kraft makes between service learning and volunteerism, and between service learning and community-based learning:

Volunteering alone generally is differentiated from service learning by having an emphasis on service without a formal, structured learning component. Community-based learning also involves learning that occurs out in the community through outdoor education, field trips, internships, but it generally does not involve any service component. (Kraft, 1996, p. 133)

To further differentiate traditional community-based experiences from service learning, Eyler, Giles, and Schmiede (1996) emphasized the crucial role played by critical reflection in service-learning courses when they reported that

students who had not been engaged in programs with reflective components were most likely to focus on the affective, the personal and the empathic dimensions of the experience. The students who were engaged in critical reflection incorporated these dimensions … but were much more likely to report also a better sense of application of ideas to social problems and a transformed understanding of the problem and issues surrounding it. We are persuaded that reflection is the glue that holds service and learning together to provide educative experiences. (p. 16)

But even if we agree with the general definition of service learning as an instructional methodology that combines community participation with content-based class discussion and critical reflection, we still have to ask: What are the philosophical underpinnings or justifications for service learning?

Theoretical Underpinnings

As noted by Morton and Troppe, service-learning theory "begins with the assumption that experience is the foundation for learning; and various forms of community service are employed as the experiential basis for leaning" (1996, p. 21). Many other authors (most notably Carver, 1997; Kolb, 1984; and also Kraft, 1996) have stressed the importance of John Dewey's theory of experiential education to the service-learning philosophy. According to those authors, modern service-learning initiatives are direct beneficiaries of Dewey's ideas about the fundamental role experience plays (or should play) in education. In his very influential work on experiential learning, Kolb (1984) extensively quotes Dewey's 1938 Experience and Education in order to formulate his own cycle (or model) for experiential education, which triangulates personal development, work, and education, placing equal importance on each one of the vortices (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Experiential Learning as the Process that Links Education, Work, and Personal Development (Kolb, 1984, p. 4)

According to Kraft (1996, p. 132), Dewey's theory of experiential education also is reflected in other critical service-learning components, such as the construction of learning outcomes, the use of group-based activities in the learning process, the use of "educative" rather than "miseducative" experiences, the reliance on the organic link between what is learned and personal experience, and opportunities for students to learn the value of altruism and personal responsibility. From a pedagogical point of view, there seems to be much agreement among service-learning researchers that this type of experiential education positively enhances student learning. Markus, Howard, and King (1993, p. 417), for example, surveyed University of Michigan undergraduates who were taking a political science course and found that students in the service-learning sections demonstrated enhanced intellectual development as well as more positive values and orientation toward the community.

Boss (1994, p. 195) compared student learning in two different sections of an ethics undergraduate course and found that students who engaged in service learning demonstrated "better grasp of the course content and made significantly greater gains in moral reasoning than their counterparts in the non-service section" (quoted in Morton and Troppe 1996, p. 22).

Critical Questions

There seems to be less agreement among researchers, however, on some critical questions that surround the service-learning "movement." One of those controversies concerns the extent to which the content of service-learning classes should be "politicized." Kahne and Westheimer (1996), for example, believe that experiential education proponents should make a clear distinction between charity and service learning. In their opinion, faculty will be able to help students truly understand the economic, social, ethnic, cultural, and gender-based factors that contribute to social problems only by doing a systematic analysis of the social problems they are examining or dealing with in their courses. By achieving a new and more sophisticated level of comprehension, students would then be able to see themselves (and community members) as agents for social change. Kahne and Westheimer recognize, however, that "many current service activities emphasize altruism and charity and fail to call into question current notions of individualism or to encourage the type of political participation that furthers democracy" (p. 597).

Likewise, Gardner (1997) has questioned the depth of the long-term effects of service learning on students and the level of commitment on the part of school districts and universities now purporting to embrace the concept. Kraft (1996), on the other hand, has asked similar questions from the perspective of community partners: what are the long-term effects of service-learning projects on community organizations and, maybe even more importantly, how much community input have schools and universities looked for when designing and implementing service-learning programs?

Other critical questions refer to the role of content-based curricula in service learning courses. For example, how much "content" should be added? How do we make sure the process itself does not overwhelm and dictate the academic outcomes? (Levesque and Prosser, 1996; Morton and Troppe, 1996). Other concerns include the mandatory character of many service-learning programs, which some critics have characterized as "involuntary servitude" (Gardner, 1997, p. 17); the role of critical reflection in the learning process (Eyler et al., 1996); and the extra workload for instructors, who many times have to restructure their courses to incorporate the service-learning component and at the same time must deal with what Wade has characterized as a "logistical nightmare" (1997).

The Media Literacy Service-Learning Project

Media Literacy

The term "media literacy" has gained prominence since the late 1980s. Just like service learning, media literacy means different things to the groups, authors, and organizations using it. In general terms, it could be defined as the ability to critically analyze, interpret, and evaluate messages that are created and disseminated by mass media. Baran has provided a more proactive definition, which includes not only the ability to "effectively and efficiently comprehend" mass media content, but also the ability to properly "utilize" those messages (1999, p. 48).

In the document known as "The People's Communication Charter," the Cultural Environment Movement (CEM), a group concerned with issues of media ownership and control, offered a political-economic definition of media literacy as "the right to acquire information and skills necessary to participate fully in public deliberation and communication. This requires facility in reading, writing, and storytelling; critical media awareness; computer literacy, and education about the role of communication in society" (1996, p. 1).

Watson and Hill, among other authors, have emphasized the importance of media literacy in the classroom. According to them, media literacy, which they call "mediacy," will be as important in the academic curriculum of the future as "literacy and numeracy are today" (1997, p. 138). Silverblatt (1995) identified several essential elements of media literacy; Baran (1999, p. 49) added a few more and produced a list of "fundamental" steps, which I have summarized as follows:

  • Being aware of the impact of the media;
  • Understanding the processes of mass communication;
  • Developing strategies for interpreting and discussing media messages;
  • Understanding media content as text that provides insight into culture and life;
  • Understanding ethical and moral responsibilities of media practitioners;
  • Developing adequate and effective production skills.

The Media Literacy Service-Learning Project

Media Literacy in the Monterey Bay Area

In 1996, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation funded a planning grant for the National Alliance for Non-Violent Programming (NANP) to initiate media literacy education and activity in the Monterey Bay area. NANP provided technical assistance and a regional coordinator to organize community collaborations and build support for a media literacy initiative in the Monterey-Santa Cruz area. Media literacy presentations and workshops were organized to recruit volunteers to help convene a community-wide planning meeting. The resultant 1997 Media Violence Summit at California State University, Monterey Bay culminated nine months of planning by volunteers from over 50 local organizations. At the closing session, conferees presented 46 written commitment points, which launched a grassroots movement known as the 1998 Monterey Bay Media Literacy Initiative, which in turn spawned the Media Literacy Alliance, Central Coast (MLACC).

The MLACC's self-defined mission is to reduce the impact and incidence of violence in all types of media through media literacy education, public awareness, and collaborative community action while respecting First Amendment rights. The coalition includes a broad-based group of community agencies, clergy, health care professionals, media, parents, educators and youth who are committed to empowering children, youth and adults to become discriminating media consumers.

Employing some of the media literacy tenets discussed in the previous section, MLACC organizes collaborative community programs to create media-savvy consumers and advocates who

  • Understand the health and safety hazards of all forms of violent media;
  • Question messages seen and heard in the media;
  • Take charge of personal media use, rather than passively acceptinginformation offered; and
  • Find ways to support pro-social programming and media outlets.
The Media Literacy Service-Learning Project

In one of the media literacy programs initiated by MLACC, César Chavez Elementary School (CCES) in East Salinas was paired with CSU Monterey Bay . As a result of that collaboration, the MLACC's executive director, CCES's principal, and a CSUMB faculty member worked together to organize a service-learning course specifically designed to place CSUMB students in CCES classrooms in order to teach media literacy to fifth- and sixth-graders at that school. César Chavez Elementary School was chosen as a pilot site because the newly built facility is one of the best technologically equipped elementary schools in the city of Salinas. Moreover, CCES's principal and key staff had been actively involved in the media literacy alliance and had participated in the 1997 Media Violence Summit.

The service-learning media literacy project and the class itself were marked by intense collaboration between the three main institutions involved, especially during the planning stage in the fall of 1998. In several meetings throughout that semester, we studied diverse media literacy curricula that have been employed in the U.S. and abroad; discussed different training pedagogies for the student facilitators; examined various topics which should be included in the class's curriculum; and took the necessary planning steps to get the project off the ground, which included laying out a very detailed schedule of meetings and workshop sessions.

The class itself, called Social Impact of Mass Media - Service Learning, was first offered by CSUMB in the spring 1999 semester as an upper-division course within the human communication major. Besides fulfilling specific major requirements, the class also fulfilled the students' university-wide upper-division service-learning requirement. The following learning objectives for the course were defined in the syllabus:

  • To investigate and explain relationships among cultural ideologies and socio-historical experiences, interests, identities, and actions of specific cultural groups.
  • To analyze different mass communication media (including new media technologies) and their cultural impact on society.
  • To analyze diverse theories that have been formulated to explain mass media's social impact.
  • To study and interpret various mass media products to better understand how those cultural products influence audiences.
  • To compare how different cultural, ethnic and social groups have been portrayed by the mass media.

Two textbooks were adopted for the class: Television: The Critical View (Newcomb, 1994), and Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences (Croteau and Hoynes, 1997). Additionally, a widely used media literacy course called "Beyond Blame" was employed both in the university classroom and at César Chavez Elementary.

"Beyond Blame" is in many ways a very simple media literacy program based on educator Paulo Freire's literacy concepts and aimed at children from eight to twelve years old. The course is divided into eight one-hour sessions that rely on various pedagogical resources such as video clips, drawings, group discussions, and newspaper clippings, to increase awareness about media messages. Specific topics discussed include media genres, styles, and formats; production techniques; implicit and explicit messages; media violence; commercialism; sexual exploitation; and media overexposure, among others.

Twenty-four CSUMB students took the class in 1999 and 24 again in 2000. The class met regularly twice a week, for a total of four hours per week. In those regular meetings, the instructor facilitated the discussion about the readings and other media-related issues and also trained the students in the Beyond Blame curriculum to be employed at César Chavez Elementary. Two of those training meetings were conducted at the school itself, where the university students met the principal and her staff and were introduced to the school's policies and regulations.

The media literacy workshop was offered to the CCES students as an after-school program for extra credit. While several of the CCES students volunteered to participate, many others were chosen or nominated by their teachers and encouraged to attend. Beyond Blame's eight recommended workshop sessions were condensed into six meetings because of scheduling conflicts. Although 55 CCES students were enrolled in the workshop sessions each semester, attendance at the meetings fluctuated from 45 to 50 students; irregular attendance was one of the difficulties we encountered throughout the project. About 45 CCES students with regular attendance "graduated" at the end of each course, for a total of 90 students for the two semesters.

Research Questions

Based on the service learning and the media literacy readings discussed here, as well as on the project itself, this study tried to answer three sets of questions:

  1. How do the university students assess their participation in the service-learning experience? What do they believe they learned from the experience? Did the service component of the class facilitate understanding of the curriculum?

  2. Did the elementary school students benefit from the project? How can we assess their participation? Were the media literacy outcomes met by the workshop sessions?

  3. Were the goals of the service-learning project generally met? Were the goals of the class itself met?

Methods

To answer those questions, I examined a variety of materials used and produced throughout the semester. I relied heavily on the CSUMB students' own interpretations as presented in their personal journals and final reflective essays. Assessment of CCES students was done by the school's principal and the teachers involved in the project. The project's "planning committee" also met several times after the program was completed to evaluate its implementation.

Students were asked to record in their journals not only the service-learning sessions themselves but also their impressions about the readings, course materials, class discussions, and other activities related to the class. They were asked to reflect on the challenges faced at the site, their struggle with the material, their relationships with the children, their questions, and their feelings about the service-learning process. Students were asked to be honest and creative. Every week, I gave them at least two questions to answer in their journals. One of the questions usually related to course materials and readings (e.g., "Observe your media consumption patterns, and discuss if you are a proactive or a passive media consumer") while the other focused on the service-learning experience (e.g., "How are you dealing with potential language barriers, when relating to the children at the site"). In terms of this study, the journals provided a great deal of insight and information about the way CSUMB students perceived and conducted the service-learning project. I was able to read and analyze 48 semester-long journals, which I quote and make references to in the upcoming Results section.

The other assignment used in this project, the reflective final essay, asked students to summarize the service-learning experience and the course itself. Students were given a list of questions to address in their essays; the questions revolved around both content-related and service-related issues. I scrutinized these 48 final reflective essays and found that they provided an honest assessment of student learning as well as of the validity of the service-learning experience. I also contacted students through e-mail when I needed to clarify particular answers. Students authorized me to quote from their journals and essays.

Results

The first research question asked how the university students assessed their participation in the service-learning program and what they believed they learned from the experience. The students' final reflective essays demonstrated an overwhelmingly positive response to the class itself and to the service-learning experience in particular. All of the student essays reflected the notion that the service component enhanced and complemented the learning done in the traditional classroom setting, reinforcing what had been reported by Markus, Howard, and King (1993); Boss (1994); and Morton and Troppe (1996).

Regarding the service-learning experience and the impact it had on his learning, one student wrote:

My experiences in service learning always leave me with a great feeling of accomplishment. It is rare that people take time away from their lives to contribute to their communities. Learning how greatly a person can benefit from a small part of your time has been one of the greatest pieces of knowledge that I have collected in my education… The time that I have spent [in the community] has been the most beneficial for myself. Learning through other people is far more valuable than learning from a lecture or reading. I believe that what I have learned this semester will continue through my entire life, instead of forgetting what I learned right away, after the test was taken or the paper was written.2

Speaking more specifically to the content of the class, the same student observed how doing the readings, participating in the class discussion, and interacting with the children together worked to dispel the myth that we are all "media experts." As avid consumers of media, he wrote, we might have some knowledge about how the media operate, which is not the same as being experts or even literate enough to comprehend what the meanings and ideological constructs behind media messages really are. He further elaborated that the distinction between being savvy media consumers and media "experts" became clear for him after the first few workshop sessions, when he realized that the children's impressive "media savviness" didn't necessarily lead them to adequately process and interpret the messages they consume.

Another student similarly noted how working with a different "audience" changed his own perspective on media issues:

Working with the kids was an eye-opener, because they have a different perspective on the way life is represented by various media sources. I was able to broaden my own perspective, and I believe the kids took something away from the experience that they might not have had otherwise.

One student believed he learned some very practical skills as a direct result of the service-learning work he did. After confessing that he is an extremely shy person, the student wrote that the experience boosted his self-confidence and showed him how much he can learn from interacting with a group (i.e., the younger students) with which he had never interacted before. Another student said she gathered some important information she intends to use in her own future career as a teacher:

The service-learning project has given me a taste of what it might be like to teach at the elementary level… I feel like I have what it takes to successfully teach children: a great deal of patience, compassion, and understanding.

Another student made interesting observations about how much she learned from interacting with a different culture, and how much having a very personal, direct contact with a predominantly Hispanic group helped her to revise some stereotypes:

My service-learning experience helped me to understand and learn about diversity within the Hispanic culture… Before I first went to CCES, I had stereotypical opinions about the Hispanic culture. The children at César Chavez helped me to break those opinions. I learned how difficult it is for these families and children to assimilate into our culture.

In their journals and essays, several students wrote about the many stereotypes they had about East Salinas - a "violent, gang-controlled" area of town, as most of them first defined it - and how out of touch with reality that picture really was. One student recalled apprehensively driving to CCES for the first time, not knowing exactly what he was "getting into," only to find himself in a part of town with houses, shops, and restaurants, people walking down the streets, mothers pushing their babies in strollers, and other scenes that conveyed "a strong sense of community." Another student directly linked those stereotypes to the class's content by noting how much media messages (especially local news reports) had contributed to his distorted perception of East Salinas and its population. "The only thing they show in the news about Salinas is gang violence, drive-by-shootings, and crime in general," a student observed during class discussion.

The "language/ethnicity issue" surfaced many times in the class throughout the semester. Although 40 of the 48 university students were English-only speakers, many of the children at CCES could speak and communicate only in Spanish. One of the ways CSUMB students and I found to work around that potential communication barrier was to assign at least one bilingual CSUMB student to each one of the workshop groups. Those students became responsible for translating the presentations, guidelines, and materials and for trying to engage the Spanish speakers in all workshop activities. Many of the journal entries indicate a gradual change in perception regarding the "language issue." At the beginning of the workshop, some CSUMB students felt frustrated for not speaking Spanish (which rendered them unable to communicate with some of the CCES children), but as the semester progressed, those same students started to feel comfortable enough to approach, communicate with, and try to fully integrate into the group, English and non-English speakers alike. Several CSUMB students reported that the attempt to communicate across languages and cultures was beneficial to the whole group. An Anglophone student observed, for example, how much he was able to identify with the Spanish-only speakers: the children's self-consciousness about their English skills reminded him how self-conscious he felt whenever he tried to practice his Spanish.

Benefits to the Elementary School Students

The second research question asked how much the elementary school students benefited from the project and how to assess their participation in the program. César Chavez Elementary School's principal and the teachers involved in the workshop strongly believe the students' participation in the project was extremely beneficial for them. In our post-workshop meetings, the principal was very emphatic about that positive impact. In her opinion, CCES students benefited from the course by gaining direct, useful knowledge on the impact of media literacy through small group class activities; by being involved in organized analysis of the impact of media through small group weekly activities; by applying those newly developed skills at home through homework activities; and by sharing key learning in class through integration into other class activities. The principal also believes the presence of CSUMB students on the elementary school campus and their direct interaction with the children for the duration of the workshop provided CCES students with positive role models and might prove crucial for those students' future decisions about attending college.

Teachers involved in the project noticed that participating CCES students shared their newly learned media literacy skills with non-participating children throughout the week. During class discussions and other class activities, these students often brought up examples drawn from the previous workshop session and many times discussed the content of what they had learned at some length with non-participating students. This sharing of information was also observed by CSUMB students. One student wrote in her final essay that she thinks the course made a difference in the children's lives not only because CCES students remembered at the end of the workshop every type of violence they had discussed in previous sessions, but also because they told her they were sharing that information with peers and family members:

By the end of the course, all of our students were able to remember the types of violence and how they affected each one of them. One of the students mentioned that he already was sharing what he learned with his parents, and that every time he watches TV or movies, he tries to identify what kind of violence is being used, and the production elements employed to make the programs or commercials more visually attractive.

In their journals and final essays, CSUMB students made a very positive assessment of CCES students' participation in the project. If in the beginning of the semester some university students were feeling frustrated because they were not sure CCES students were "getting it," after a few workshop sessions they felt that they had established a connection between them and the children, which in turn facilitated the elementary students' comprehension of the material.

One student registered this process in her journal:

My first reaction after doing the first readings and class discussions was: "These children are never going to understand this stuff." The very first visit [to CCES] proved me wrong. Even though my group members and myself felt nervous and unprepared, the children did not seem to mind. They jumped right into the conversation without any inhibitions. They shared personal experiences and related them to the material we were discussing. They were able to give examples of different types of violence, and shows that were not violent.

The same student, however, noted that she is not sure the children will retain the knowledge and skills they developed: "The children picked up on the material quickly, but I do not believe they know quite what to do with it. They understood what we were trying to teach them, but did not understand why we were teaching it to them."

CSUMB students also observed that workshop sessions were most effective when CCES students brought up examples that were relevant to their own daily lives and personal experiences. The university students were very happy to use those as "teachable moments" that they believe will have a much greater impact on the elementary students' lives. One student registered in his journal one of those moments: a discussion about "real life violence" sparked by a 12-year old girl's statement that she knew a boy in her class who brought a knife to school. The university student responded to her by telling the group about a stabbing murder that happened on his high school campus:

They all listened and we did really connect. They told us about the violence in their lives. We totally strayed from the lesson plan, but I believe we learned more [from this discussion] than in any other session we had. It was probably the most important thing we learned all day. We were all being honest, and they "got it."

The third research question asks if the outcomes of the project and the goals of the class were generally met. I believe that the parameters to answer this question were set by the two previous research questions. The students' feeling of having benefited from the program is, in my opinion, the best indication of its success. Except for the shortcomings, which will be discussed in the next section, I do believe that, based on the students' assessment, the program generally succeeded in achieving its stated outcomes.

Discussion

Examining some of the "critical questions" that surround the service-learning pedagogy, Kraft (1996) brought into discussion the issue of community participation and involvement. In his article, he wrote that "[t]he opportunities for cross-cultural learning are greatly enhanced if the service partners are engaged in written and verbal reflection that is shared with each other throughout the service experience" (p. 137). He also implied that, for the most part, that has not been the case with most service-learning projects.

I want to start this discussion of results by emphasizing the importance of community engagement. Every time esteemed pedagogue Paulo Freire wrote or talked about liberation pedagogy or liberation education, he made a point of stressing how important it is to engage the oppressed and their community into the educational process itself:

A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students, co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating knowledge… In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement (1998, p. 51).

It is precisely this "committed involvement" from the part of the community that could guarantee the success of service-learning projects. By actively engaging the school's principal and staff, the students' parents, and the media literacy organization, I not only sought the advice of those directly affected by the project's outcomes, but also successfully secured their participation, while raising the stakes for their personal investment in the program.

Some of the questions that now come to my mind and that perhaps should be considered by instructors planning similar courses include the following: Could I, as a university instructor with very limited knowledge of elementary school education, have known which media literacy curriculum was the most adequate for those students' age and skills range? Could I have developed a course that attended to the specific needs of the community without knowing exactly where my students would be placed? Perhaps, but it is arguable that, with a less collaborative planning process, the project's outcomes would not have been as successful as they were. This article itself, written in consultation with the various community and educational partners involved in the media literacy project, attests to the positive, long-term effects of that collaboration.

The community involvement aspect also helps to address some of the other critical questions posed at the beginning of this article. The workload issues discussed by Wade (1997), for example, were partially alleviated because of the shared responsibilities between educational and community partners. Likewise, the question posed by Kahne and Westheimer (1996) regarding the extent to which the content of service-learning classes should be "political" also surfaced during the collaborative planning stages. Based on their previous community experiences, both the media literacy leader and the school principal anticipated and shared with the university instructor some of the ethnic-, language-, and class-based questions that were likely to surface throughout the semester. Those discussions influenced the instructor to adopt course textbooks that directly addressed some of those issues.

Additionally, the CSUMB students also contributed to raising the critical level of the course. By critically reflecting on their service-learning experience, as well as on their own personal issues of race, class and gender, the students questioned the validity of their jobs as workshop leaders (they wondered if they should be the ones telling CCES students what to watch on television and how to watch it), and they acquired a more critical perspective about the media themselves. By integrating those diverse approaches - and by making use of a curriculum that had anticipated those questions - the university students were able to position themselves more comfortably (and conscientiously) in front of the workshop classroom.

Gardner (1997) raised the question of the long-term effects of service learning on the students. This is a very valid question, which deserves special attention. At this point, it is impossible for me to tell how much students will retain from what they learned in this service-learning experience. However, judging by the many references they made in their journals and personal essays to this service-learning project as a "life-changing" experience, it is possible to infer that students will retain and employ some of what they learned in this course in their personal, academic, and professional lives.

I also want to discuss what I perceive to be some of the shortcomings of this project. The first one refers to parental participation and involvement. Media literacy projects are generally built around the assumption that parents play a fundamental role in the education of their children. Therefore, those projects rely heavily on the parents' participation and involvement. We intended to get the parents involved in the program since its inception, but we were not able to do so. Although meetings with the parents were planned, these had to be cancelled because of conflicting schedules: most CCES parents work as farm laborers and were unable to come to school during their busy farming season. We still have to find a way of securing parental involvement in future workshops.

Another shortcoming of the project related to the elementary school students' attendance and participation. Since participation in the workshop was voluntary, due to the after-class nature of the program, many students did not feel obligated to come to every one of the sessions. This fluctuating attendance was detrimental to group cohesion and continuity. Possible ways of remedying the problem include making attendance mandatory, perhaps by having the program take place as a regularly scheduled class activity, or by offering participation incentives and awards that are more appealing to the students.

A third shortcoming, pointed out by several CSUMB students in their class evaluations, related to the workshop training. Student groups had difficulty meeting out of the classroom to prepare their lesson plans because of the students' busy work and class schedules. They have suggested that, in the future, we spend more class time specifically preparing for the workshop sessions.

Future service-learning programs of this kind should pay particular attention to the integration between course content and "service" content. Levesque and Prosser (1996) and Morton and Troppe (1996) have referred to the role of content-based curriculum in service-learning courses, asking for example how much "content" should be added. And how do we make sure the process itself does not overwhelm and dictate the academic outcomes? Although a serious effort was made to guarantee the integration between the different "pulls" of the curriculum, several times throughout the semester, I did feel overwhelmed by the task of keeping those components in balance. My advice: plan ahead, give yourself time to develop the syllabus and curriculum, and make sure the service site chosen (as well as the service program implemented) match the proposed content of the course.

Notes

  1. The author would like to thank and acknowledge the contributions to this project made by Brenda Shinault, MLACC coordinator; Roxanne Regules, principal, and Martin Cisneros, teacher, César Chavez Elementary School.
  2. Students authorized the author to use excerpts from their journals and essays.

Works Cited

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Posted October 29, 2001
Updated February 25, 2003

All material appearing in this journal is subject to applicable copyright laws. Publication in this journal in no way indicates the endorsement of the content by the California State University, the Institute for Teaching and Learning, or the Exchanges Editorial Board.©2001 by Raul Reis.

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