“While the student enthusiasm for the class’ service learning component has been incredible, the biggest response has been from the AIS Advisory Council. Our alumni and supporters have been quite moved by our students’ efforts to provide tax assistance in the community, in Kansas, and across the nation.”
--Raquel Alexander, Assistant Professor, Accounting and Information Systems
“In my classes, service-learning means that students are required to perform community service for twenty hours over the course of the semester, at a list of pre-selected sites. In addition, they must write up field notes and reflections after each community service experience and write a paper based on their service experience at the end of the term. Service-learning is much more than volunteering in the community; it is learning through experience and reflection. Through service-learning, students work with community members who do not walk the halls of privilege, except perhaps to clean or repair them. Students’ interactions with community members not only teach them to value the people they may have failed to notice before, but also teach them to question their position in the social hierarchy, turning their skills of critical analysis inwards. Most of all, students realize how much they have yet to learn and how much the world around them has to teach them.”
--Tanya Golash-Boza, Assistant Professor, Sociology
“In my class we talk about many different issues related to equity in education. When students actually put those ideas into practice through service learning, they come to better understand the impact that they can have on the world around them. As future educators, my students are hopeful about the role they will play in shaping the lives of others. But a service learning opportunity makes that hope a reality for them now, while also letting them see the practical constraints to doing this work.”
--Karen Lombardi, GTA, Education
“Service learning has enriched my life as a professor, my students’ lives, and the people with whom my students work in the community. For thirty years, undergraduate students in the Department of Applied Behavioral Science (the KU Program in Human Development and Family Life) have been able to participate in a senior practicum in a program called the Truancy Prevention and Diversion Program. Recognized as a model program, KU undergraduate students receive instruction and supervised experience that allow them to participate in real-world work in the human service field and to gain the satisfaction of knowing they made a difference in a child’s or youth’s life. Most of these KU undergraduate students go on to work in the human service field or attend graduate or law school and subsequently report that it was this service learning opportunity as an undergraduate at KU that impacted their lives in meaningful ways. So why is service learning important? Service and learning are life long endeavors that change people’s lives. Instilling in our undergraduates not only knowledge and skills but also the understanding and compassion that come from helping others will undoubtedly be our key to a better future!”
--Jan Sheldon, Professor, Applied Behavioral Science
“Our undergraduate program provides practicum/service learning experiences for all majors. Thus, students not only learn about the principles of learning and how these principles have been used to help solve human problems, they also get direct experience in helping solve human problems. In the practicum/service learning course that I supervise, for example, undergraduate students spend two semesters teaching children with autism. The students teach children with autism a wide variety of skills: to follow simple instructions, to imitate behaviors demonstrated by their teachers, to identify and label objects and people, to talk to children and adults, and to play with other children. In essence, my service learning practicum in autism provides opportunities for students to test in real life the relevance of what they have previously learned through discussion and reading and to see immediately the direct effects that they can have on the life of a young child who needs their help.”
--James A. Sherman, Professor and Former Chair, Applied Behavioral Science