eSource for College Transitions, Vol. 18 No. 4 December 2021
Effecting Change: A Redesigned FYS Call-to-Action Service Learning Project Lydia Laucella , Assistant Director, Center for Innovative Teaching and Engaged Learning, Assistant Professor of Education and Instructional Design Center for Innovative Teaching and Engaged Learning, Reinhardt University Dr. Walter May , Dean of Students, Reinhardt University
Abstract During the Covid-19 pandemic, some college students have felt isolated, seeking connections with peers, with faculty, and with community partners. During this time, political and social issues in the United States have brought awareness to the need for a platform for youth to voice their opinions and to effect change. During the Fall 2020 semester, the Reinhardt University FYS administrators were tasked with revising the FYS curriculum to fit the needs of its first-year student population. To fit a new course design, a pre-existing service learning project would need to be redesigned to be student-driven, site-flexible, social-change forward, compliant with Covid-19 restrictions, and aligned to the institution’s QEP assessment plan. This article outlines the creation of the 6- week long project titled, Effecting Change: A Call-to-Action Service Learning Project, which resulted in Reinhardt’s first-year students making an impact on the Reinhardt University campus and its surrounding communities.
Introduction Service learning and community-based learning opportunities are recognized as a high-impact educational practice by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. These learning opportunities “model the idea that giving something back to the community is an important college outcome, and that working with community partners is good preparation for citizenship, work, and life” (AAC&U, 2020). Service to the institution and to the larger community is an integral part of Reinhardt University’s (RU) culture and aligns with the university’s mission, which is to educate the whole person by developing the intellectual, social, personal, vocational, spiritual, and physical dimensions of its students. It is also an integral part of Reinhardt University’s First-Year Seminar (FYS) course, a 25-person capacity course that is mandatory for all incoming, first-year students.
Problem In the Fall 2020 semester, 310 first-year students were enrolled across 15 FYS course sections, including two Honors sections. The Covid-19 pandemic required Reinhardt’s FYS administrators-the author (current FYS Coordinator) and coauthor, Dr. Walter May (Dean of Students and former FYS Coordinator)- to replicate engaging face-to-face interactions typical of the FYS course in modified online spaces. This was particularly challenging in a course that is reliant on fostering in-person, studentto-student, and student-to-faculty interactions, especially since many of RU’s students could face difficulty engaging in on-ground classes because of work commitments, athletic travel, or quarantine mandates based on pandemic mitigation efforts. A micro-hybrid FYS course model was piloted in Fall 2020 that was intentionally designed to accommodate the first-year students’ needs. The micro-hybrid course fused brief on-ground; in-person scheduled meetings (students were provided a synchronous meeting option) with
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additional weekly asynchronous learning components. All sections of FYS utilized the same course design, providing a common first-year experience. In the process of redesigning the course, the FYS faculty encountered a hurdle, how to redesign a pre-existing service learning component that would fit the micro-hybrid course design model while accounting for Covid-19 masking and social distancing requirements. Additionally, RU’s Quality Enhancement Plan required specific assessment and reporting guidelines for service learning experiences. Therefore, the redesigned service learning project needed to be student-driven, site-flexible, and aligned to RU’s QEP assessment plan.
Designing Effecting Change When considering how to redesign the project, not only would the outcome of the project need to be measurable for reporting HIP engagement, but what is more, the FYS faculty felt a sense of urgency to create a project that could foster meaningful connections to the campus and to the community. This sense of urgency arose because of two reasons- the impact of Covid-19 on our first-year students and the social climate in the United States during the time of the project’s redesign. Covid-19 could negatively impact students’ college transition experiences and their development of a sense of belonging. Many college students have felt isolated because of the pandemic (Gopalan & Brady 2020). Quarantine, social distancing, and limited social interactions might have curtailed students’ interactions with faculty, students, and community partners. Yet, these interactions are vital to first-year students’ development of a sense of belonging. The project redesign was also influenced by the political and social climate of the United States during the time of the redesign. There was a rise in youth-activism, a heightened awareness of social justice issues, and the desire for a platform in which youth can voice their opinions and effect change. Effecting Change: A Call-to-Action Service Learning Project, was created as a fusion of Delaney’s (2015) call-to-action project with a previous social-change forward project the author had created. Effecting Change was a six-week project, containing four components: a proposal, a check-in, the call-to-action, and a presentation. The Effecting Change project was designed to be student-driven, siteflexible, and social-change forward. Students a.) picked a call-to-action subject of interest, b.) completed research on their subject of interest and developed a rationale for why they chose that subject, c.) chose their audience (requirements were at least twenty people), d.) proposed a timeline to complete their call-to-action, and e.) chose a method in which they would conduct it (e.g. petition, donation, solicitation of a behavioral change). Students chose their cause and conducted their call-to-action in any desired format as long as it adhered to the audience requirements. For instance, they could choose to create and distribute t-shirts on campus spreading awareness of youth suicide prevention, or, they could choose to elicit Red Cross donations for the 2020 wildfires in Oregon.
