As a compositionist, I find the current interest in the scholarship of teaching both gratifying and encouraging. Those of us who teach writing as a primary specialty have been engaged in the scholarship of teaching from the first day we encouraged a student to commit thought to paper. "Teaching" students to write is what we (try to) do. Deciding how best to facilitate the development of the reading/writing/critical thinking processes of students with different intelligences, learning styles, literacy experiences, and motivation constitutes an ongoing -- if not always articulated or formalized -- scholarship.

Teaching general education courses is not for the faint of heart. Those first two years -- but especially that first semester -- offer a time of enculturation for students into postsecondary ways of learning/thinking/being. No one calls home if they miss class or fall behind in their work. They have to budget time for the intellectual rigors (we hope) of the university curriculum as well as time for social and extracurricular activities and work schedules. And, of course, at George Mason University, most students have the onerous task of commuting to campus to face the ubiquitous parking "problem."

Teaching first-year students in their first semester can be particularly challenging. According to research reported by Peggy Chalker, Associate Director, Educational Programs and Research at George Mason University, students tend to decide whether or not they will be returning the second semester during the first six weeks of this crucial first term. Consequently, first impressions are important for retention. Students want to feel that they belong to their school, that they fit in and that they have a support system if they need it. On the other hand, faculty want to ensure that these students have a solid curricular grounding for their future educational experiences at the institution. So how can a course (or a group of courses) provide a nurturing (but not overprotective) atmosphere that both helps student negotiate that first semester in college yet still provides a rigorous curriculum? And how can we ensure that ours is an institution that invites students to stay?

In the February issue of inventio, David Potter (1999) posed the question "Is George Mason a learning-centered university?" He framed his discussion within the Ten Principles of Learning and invited conversation based on these principles and their applicability to the George Mason community. I would like to join this conversation by describing the Community Service Link, a teaching/learning project at Mason, in which I was involved from fall 1995 through fall 1998.

The Context and Background of the Community Service Link

In this essay I describe the Community Service Link (CSL) and the three courses within it. I then analyze the CSL within the frame provided by the Ten Principles of Learning from the Task Force on Student Learning (Potter, 1999) in order to demonstrate how the CSL has contributed to making Mason a learning-centered university.

The CSL is one grouping of courses within the Linked Courses Program.  This program has provided support for entering first-year students since its inception in the fall of 1992 under the direction of Terry Zawacki, who served as director through the spring of 1998. The current director is Teresa Michals. Faculty are selected to teach in this program because of their commitment to incoming first-year students, their teaching expertise, and their willingness to work collaboratively in course planning with their linked partner(s). The overall purpose of these links is to help the student find a community with which s/he can relate academically as well as socially.

Students enroll in at least two courses, one of which has usually been ENGL 101 Composition. In one version, a group of students in a large lecture introductory course, such as Psychology, Sociology, or Anthropology, enroll in a section of ENGL 101 in a group of 22 students. This more loosely linked version allows students in a large lecture class to experience a closer community in the English class. In another version, such as the Community Service Link, the non-English course has fewer students so that all students enrolled in the non-English course are also enrolled in the sections of the English composition course. This configuration allows for more integrated curricular planning between the teachers.

Planning for the CSL began in the spring of 1995. This link brought together three courses: SOCI 101 Introductory Sociology, one section of 44 students taught by Victoria Rader; ENGL 101 Composition, two sections of 22 each; and UNIV 100 Freshman Seminar with a community service focus, both of which I taught. Over the course of the next four years, Victoria and I worked together to evolve a highly integrated curriculum.

Our vision had several objectives, articulated now in retrospect. We wanted to help students develop a learning community in which they could find support from us, their UNIV 100 Peer Advisor, and each other through their first semester at Mason. We saw their community service as a means of providing opportunities for the instantiation of sociological concepts, based on their own experiences as students and those they had as paraprofessionals in the educational setting at an elementary school in the northern Virginia area. We hoped to initiate the CSL students into the literacy practices required of them in their postsecondary education and to develop their skills as critical thinkers. We also hoped to challenge their received ways of knowing, not to change their thinking just because we "said so," but to help them become critical participants in the construction of their emerging knowledges.

Despite the fact that these three courses worked in tandem, each course had its own syllabus, overall course expectations and grading structure. Over the four years, Victoria presented SOCI 101 from two thematic perspectives. For the first three years, the course was based on the concept of the sociological imagination, defined as the capacity to understand the interrelationships among an individual's personal biography and her/his time and place. The course was divided into three sociological themes, each with its own focus: Social Movements (indigenous people of the America); Social Roles (gender): and Social Institutions (education). Readings chosen to support these themes the first three years included I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Social Movements), Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, College Culture (Social Roles), and excerpts from Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievement of America's Educationally Underprepared and Savage Inequalities.

The fourth year, she based the course on the sociology of difference, to include race, class, and gender, still with the same focuses, using excerpts from The Sociology of Difference: American Constructions of Race, Sex and Gender, Social Class and Sexual Orientation. Victoria used writing in her course in two major ways: "writing to learn" assignments in which she provided prompts to help students focus/clarify their thinking about the sociological issues under discussion and "writing to show learning" assignments in which students wrote responses to readings and activities assigned outside of class.

The first of my two courses, ENGL 101 Composition, was based on the writing-process model. Students were assigned activities to help them become aware of their own writing processes as well as to expose them to ways of composing, revising, and editing to suit the needs of a particular rhetorical situation. Course readings, based primarily on those in SOCI 101, were used to teach close reading, focusing on such issues as genre, organization, and style. Students were also taught and expected to use such computer/information technology applications as email, word processing, the electronic bulletin board TownHall, and Mason's online catalogues and databases. In addition, Victoria and I co-wrote three formal writing assignments, one of which was a researched essay on an aspect of education as a social institution in the United States.

The second of my two courses was UNIV 100 Freshman Seminar with its community service focus. Each UNIV 100 section has a particular focus (to include Academic Skills, Outdoor Learning, Computer Age; and African American Studies, in addition to Community Service). All, however, are expected to provide a core curriculum that supports student success in their first semester with topics such as time management, study skills, learning styles, campus support services, healthy life styles, and leadership activities. A Peer Advisor for each section assists both teacher and students in accomplishing these aims. Students in UNIV 100 sections are also expected to participate in the Team Development Course at Hemlock Overlook, Mason's Center for Outdoor Education in Clifton. For four years Victoria and I joined our CSL students in this four-hour, rain-or-shine event, learning to solve problems collaboratively in an outdoor setting.

Students in the CSL UNIV 100 performed community service two hours a week for nine weeks at Clara Barton [elementary] Magnet School located in a working-class neighborhood populated primarily by African Americans and immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala. I coordinated the placement of Mason students into Clara Barton classrooms. Students worked in the same teaching/learning situation with the same group of students at grade levels matched as closely as possible to the desires of the CSL students and the needs of the participating teachers. Their tasks allowed them to work in close proximity with the Clara Barton students. This community service provided experiential grounding for sociological concepts focusing primarily on the sociology of difference (to include ethnicity, class, and gender) and on education as a social institution.

CSL students wrote field notes to process their service-learning experience. Written after each session, these field notes provided opportunities for them to report and reflect on their experiences and to relate them to concepts under consideration in Victoria's course. The field notes were divided into three sections. In the Observation sections, students wrote about what they had observed (to include as many senses as appropriate) in the session. The purpose of this section was to train them to attend carefully to what was going on around them on a particular day and to report their observations as objectively as possible.

In the Reflection/Analysis section, students were asked to reflect on their experiences. In this section, they could write about whatever they chose, to include complaining about assigned tasks, recalling/connecting with their own experience in elementary school, wondering about student (and even teacher) behavior, or offering hypotheses about their observations. The purpose of this section was to allow them to vent when necessary and to infer and suggest hypotheses as creatively as they wished.

In the Question section, students wrote out at least three questions concerning the day's experiences. These questions gave them the opportunity to problematize their experiences and to connect their experiential learning with the more vicarious and abstract material presented in the sociology class. They also helped students focus their observations during future visits to the school and to find topics for their researched essay on issues in education in the United States, a dually-submitted assignment for ENGL 101 and SOCI 101. Through my weekly reading and responding to these field notes, I was able to provide feedback to help them learn to keep detailed observations as well as to recognize the difference between reporting observations and inferring from them.

Having provided this background, I will demonstrate how the Community Service Link exemplifies learning-centeredness at George Mason University, using the Ten Principles as a frame. My primary source of evidence comes from the student voices recorded in the Reflection/Analysis section of their field notes and a final reflective writing, in which students used their field notes as evidence for sociological patterns they had discerned in their fieldwork.

Two caveats are needed at this point. First, in perusing these principles, although delineated separately as a means of analysis and focus, I noticed how interconnected they are. Consequently my application of these principles in my students' field notes quickly revealed this web. And so, what I have chosen as examples in one principle could also be apparent in another.

Second, I have disrupted the order of these principles as presented in Potter's inventio article by moving the Principle of Social Interaction and the Principle of the Learning Climate to the end of the list. These two principles seem to encompass the previous eight, and I think the weight of the evidence that I provide from student comments bears out this assertion.

Through the Community Service Link, we tried to provide a plethora of opportunities for connectedness to occur. The concepts and ideas presented in SOCI 101 formed the basis for class discussion not only in SOCI 101 but also in the Reflection/Analysis section of the field notes. I enhanced these connections in ENGL 101 through close readings of the texts which presented these ideas/concepts along with helping students connect these ideas/concepts and students' emerging awareness of themselves as learners/thinkers/writers. The experiential component of their community service was foundational to their interaction between deliberation and action. Students had to make on-the-spot decisions about how to best work with a particular child.

Hanna noticed a connection between gender as a sociological construct and gender in action:

Retta took personal responsibility for challenging students to a higher level of difficulty. In doing so, she demonstrated a connection between mind and environment. Having observed how well her students had done on the teacher-generated assignment, she capitalized on that success by moving students to a more difficult activity on her own.

In the [3rd grade] math group today, I was surprised how quickly the girls I worked with went through the level one cards [that the teacher had told me to use]. I asked them if they wanted to try harder cards and they eagerly said 'yes.' That made me feel like I was doing my job well. They had a little trouble with three numbers but I gave them hints and they did much better.

For many of our CSL students, nothing was more compelling than their work with "their" students at Clara Barton Magnet School. Actually, I had counted on this attitude. Setting up this field work for the students each year was time/labor intensive. In addition, I had to initially persuade the CSL students to expend their time and energy in making a weekly trip to a school some 20 miles from campus. But I trusted my intuition about the potentially powerful interactions between the Clara Barton students and the CSL students and trusted that once I got the two groups together they would work their own magic. (I was not disappointed.)

For many of the CSL students, going back to elementary school in the role not of student but of paraprofessional was eye-opening; they began to see themselves as the adult in the situation and took on this responsibility seriously. For several students over the four years, their commitment to "their" students at Clara Barton was the only thing keeping them connected with Mason at all. They might have been able to ignore their responsibilities to their other course (and even their responsibility to record their experiences at Clara Barton in their field notes), but they made it to Clara Barton to work with "their kids" each week. Because of this sustained sense of responsibility, they were able to see the rewards in their work with their students.

Tyler realized the impact he had had on his students in his field notes on the last day of his community service:

I was overcome with joy when all the [kindergarten] children gave me a huge hug. It made me realize that these kids were really going to miss my presence in the classroom. One child might miss me helping him with his handwriting, or another child might miss me being a friend to them, but no matter what, each child takes from the experience, I hope, that I was a role model and someday they might think back and remember me.

Derrick, one of the two CSL students who helped set up Clara Barton's computer lab, noted the students' expectation of him to be a knowledgeable adult:

Kristin not only expressed her joy at being considered a guide to the students, she realized that teaching is challenging work:

Dana, a courageous young woman who had survived a challenging upbringing, found evidence of her worth in interacting with her students:

Nowhere was this active search for meaning more evident than in the field notes. In this writing space students were challenged not only to recall/record what they had experienced but also to reflect on those experiences in light of what they had experienced as elementary school students and what they were learning about themselves as learners/thinkers/writers within the more expansive social context. These attempts to puzzle out a situation took place over time, although sometimes students just posed problems with their hypotheses.

Eileen observed an apparent correlation between students who had trouble writing their names clearly and correctly and the accuracy of their work:

Tyler took a special long term interest in a student, trying to understand what prompted his behavior and working through a plan for helping the student modify his behavior to enhance his learning:

Lee (in her reflective essay) came to the conclusion that "students actually learn better if they were encouraged and loved more by the educator." She continued:

One particular experience supports this assertion. During my fourth session (10/21/98) at Clara Barton, I had an opportunity to work with a student named Todd, who was behind in his class assignments. While I was helping him, I found that he was actually doing better when I was being kinder and more patient with him. I discovered that it was wrong to be annoyed with him at his lack of understanding of my explanations because he was only a first grader and may have been too young to pick up everything the first time. I was able to see this pattern again during my fifth session (10/28/98) while I had another chance to work individually with Eric. [He reacted like Todd].

Such was our perspective in working with students in their writing. We assigned challenging projects with high expectations but also provided the support that enabled students, when they chose to put in the effort, to meet these expectations. Some students needed more scaffolding than others, and some were more ready for the challenges of university life than others; however, our recognition of the developmental nature of learning undergirded how we interacted with students.

A prime example of this scaffolding (as noted later in the principle on feedback) occurred in the field notes. Students were expected to note their observations as objectively as possible, even to identifying students by sex and ethnicity. I asked for this precision so that when students were asked to reflect on their fieldwork at the end of the term, they had a rich database from which to draw inferences.

Chelsea not only noted the changes she saw in two particular students over time but candidly noted her own development in making conclusions about human behavior:

My first perception of B. [in a combined k/1st grade class] was that he seemed to be a stubborn, hard-to-work-with child. He continually questioned the teacher's authority by ignoring her instructions and demanding reasons for doing what he was told. Today, this was not my perception of him. I feel that his behavior still suggests that he needs more attention than the other students.

Over the course of several weeks, Tara questioned the efficacy of having students work in Learning Centers in small groups in a combined 2nd/3rd grade class while the teacher worked with other students and even discussed the situation with her mother, who is a teacher in a pre-kindergarten program:

Last week I was concerned because these kids have no structure in the classroom and that second and third graders are in the same room. While the kids are at their [learning] centers they do what they want, not what they are supposed to but the teachers don't know because they are working with other kids at different centers. I feel that this learning style is crazy, but the kids seem to be learning from it. When I listen to the kids working with Mrs. T, they know addition and subtraction like the back of their hand. I talked to my mother about this and she said that schools are trying to get away from sitting at the desk with the teacher in front of the room to teach. They want more hands-on learning for the kids.

Over time, she concludes that perhaps this learning situation has its merits:

The writing-process pedagogy practiced in both versions of first-year composition at Mason -- ENGL 100 Composition for Nonnative Speakers of English and ENGL 101 Composition -- assumes such feedback is integral to the learning process. And since students were writing assignments for both ENGL 101 and SOCI 101 that asked them to apply the sociological concepts they were studying in SOCI 101, the act of writing about these concepts as well as our feedback on their drafts further enhanced student learning. In-class writings also helped us determine what was and was not being understood so that subsequent class periods could address any misunderstandings.

In addition, my weekly responses to their field notes were designed to give them a clear indication of how they were doing. Early in each of the four semesters, students routinely had difficulty in keeping their observations free of the inferences that belonged in the Reflection/Analysis section. I insisted that they work on this distinction so that they could understand that our perceptions are filtered through our belief systems and that one way to reduce the effects of this filtering is to focus as clearly as the moment allowed on what was happening in their teaching situation. For example, saying that the students were "rowdy" was an inference; reporting that students would not sit down or stop talking when asked was an observation.

I was also able to assist CSL students in their work with their students. For example, when Kristin expressed concern about the apparent memorization techniques being used to teach reading, she asked whether it would be all right if she could use a more phonetic approach since the other method, based on her observation of Tarika, did "not seem to be working." I replied that she should do what she thought best and suggested that "in addition to sounding out words, when a child mis-reads a word in a sentence, ask her/him if the word s/he read makes sense in the sentence."

And when Lee noted that a student named Randy had trouble focusing on his work and wondered how to help him "pay attention," I was able to suggest that she try breaking up the activity and may even allowing him to stand up and move around a bit during a task.

I was also able to help students transfer a concept in presented in Sociology with their own experience. For example, when Andy recounted his frustration at students' responding to him "as a friend and not an adult," I was able to remind him that "Sociologists call your situation role confusion." However, I was not always so helpful. When later Andy asks "Do I help the children too much or am I giving them the support and help that they need?" , I can only respond "always a tough question for any teacher (including me!)"

I was also able to suggest alternative ways of seeing a particular situation. Retta noted that:

My response -- "And she may not have had the same school experiences as others in her class" -- offered Retta another aspect of the situation to consider.

Darlene described a problem related to child care:

My query -- "What other options does the parent have? Leave the child at home?" -- was intended to get Darlene to not only empathize with the parents but consider the conundrum they were facing. (It also offered a possible topic for her to consider for her researched paper.)

The Principle of Incidental Learning

CSL students traveled to/from Clara Barton each of the nine weeks by carpool. Victoria and I will have no way of ever knowing just how much incidental learning took place among the students in these carpools, not only about English 101/ Sociology 101 but other life skills as well. However I am aware, at least anecdotally, that students used this travel time to talk about what was going on their academic and personal lives. On the other hand, their field notes revealed instances of learning for which we had not planned.

Kristin expressed surprise at having learned something about herself:

Will learned about the rigors of teaching:

Wayne connected these rigors with the overall goals of education:

They also learned from their students. Tara put it this way:

And Will did his own reality check:

Working at Clara Barton helped me gain more experience in dealing with children and working with other adults. I also feel that I learned about what it takes to work in the real world.

This principle interacts strongly with the principle of development and holism. Some students come to college more ready to have their received knowledge challenged than other students. Asking students to "unlearn personal views" (and the underlying and most likely unarticulated belief systems on which these views are based) needs to be approached with sensitivity because this request often asks them to challenge the views of those closest to them, most likely family and peers. And yet, as educators, we would be remiss if we did not challenge students to view the world from different perspectives and if we did not assist them in figuring out how to transfer learning from one context to the another. And we should expect "rough edges" along the way.

The individual experience students gained in their community service experience proved invaluable in providing a safe space in which students could test out their previous understandings of such social issues as race, class, and gender within an educational setting. I was able/privileged to witness their inquiry.

Maria demonstrated her ability to transfer her understandings of a sociological construct to one of her ESL students:

Alana took on her bias about the neighborhood she was entering and connected that feeling with earlier experiences of difference in her own elementary school:

Kristin connected her reading in one educational setting -- the Sociology course at Mason -- with her "reading" of a situation in another educational setting:

An Eskimo proverb states that the teacher is the one who is present when learning takes place. Ultimately, our goal as educators should be to help students become their own teachers. To this end, I used learning style inventories and my own adaptation of the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator to get students to consider who they were as learners. In addition, I asked them throughout the semester to reflect on their writing processes as we completed each writing assignment. And, of course, the field notes helped them take control of their learning. Over the course of the four years, I was amazed at how diligently (though not without a bit of grumbling) the majority of the CSL students wrote their field notes -- and, in the process, I hope, internalized a habit of mind that will benefit them as life-long learners.

Irene noted the importance of a systematic means of processing her experiences:

Chad relates two different community service experiences:

The Principle of Social Interaction and The Principle of Learning Climate

As noted earlier, I have grouped these last two principles together and moved them to the end of the list. It was the highly socially interactive nature as evidenced in the challenging yet (we hope) supportive learning climate that made the enactment of the previous eight principles possible.

Learning is done by individuals who are intrinsically tied to others as social beings, interacting as competitors or collaborators, constraining or supporting the learning process, and able to enhance learning through cooperation and sharing.

This principle was evident in the community-oriented nature of the CSL.. Students were encouraged to work together and communicate in person and online throughout the semester. Working in groups was a common classroom practice in both SOCI 101 and ENGL 101. However, this social interaction extended to the work the CSL students did with their students.

Dana noted a special affiliation with a student who seemed unable to stay focused on a task and regularly had his name put on the board for misbehaving and lost his recess to complete his work:

Ann expressed her engagement with her students and the satisfaction that it gave her:

This principle assumes that an effective learning climate has to provide the "right" balance of comfort and stress. Activities need to be challenging enough to forestall boredom and to ask students to move beyond what they already know or can do but possible enough so that students think they can meet the challenges. Such motivation from teacher to students and from students to students was evident in all three courses in the CSL.

Kristin commented on the learning climate in this way:

Closure

Having presented what I consider compelling evidence in the students' own words that the CSL is a robust example of the existence of learning centeredness at Mason, I am left with eternal question "so what?" Sure, the CSL was a nice project, but how many faculty have the opportunity, time, energy, or even interest to pursue something similar? Does that mean, then, that faculty interested in pursuing a more learning-centered approach are restricted to the CSL model? And just how many principles have to be met before a teacher can make any claim toward creating a learning-centered environment for their students?

While the definitive responses to these questions are outside my purview, I would venture two applicable adages for faculty and staff to consider as they try to make Mason more learning-centered.

"Bloom where you are planted": Each of us is in a unique place within the Mason community. Consequently, we each have the potential to make Mason more learning-centered in whatever capacity we engage with students.

"Do what you can with what you have right where you are": We may not be able to enact a learning-centered environment such as the CSL, and yet we can consider one or more of the principles as we set up our interactions with Mason students. If all ten seem too daunting, we could choose the one that seems to resonate the most with our current teaching/learning philosophy and implement it, moving on to others as our comfort level permits.

And I think that we have to recognize the learning-centeredness is not an "either/or" or a "one-time" happening. We work toward aspects of it each time we interact with a student one-on-one or in a classroom.

As I have done my own reflection of this four-year experience, I am reminded of the comment made by a compositionist named David Bartholomae who noted in 1985 that "I am continually impressed by the patience and goodwill of our students" (reprinted in Villanueva, 1999, 590). And while he was referring to the process for placing student writers into appropriate composition classes, his word ring true in my experiences with the students in the Community Service Link. Over the course of a nine-week period, they engaged with their students and rose to challenges that none of us expected.

Natalie's final comment in her reflective essay summed up the sense of the CSL students over the four years:

To which I replied "My pleasure!"

Notes and References