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.