On the Wednesday of spring break I visited with Ann Abbott at her office in FLB.  I don’t know whether this will become my pattern when having other conversations of this sort, I do hope to have several more such chats in the future, but this time around it made sense to me to wait a bit before writing up my sense of the discussion.  This way I hope to have a greater take away from the discussion and ensure that some of the points that Ann made stick with me over time.

Let me begin on a personal note.  The conversation was delightful.  It so reminded me of the interviews with faculty I did along with Cheryl Bullock back in the early summer of 1996, when I first got started with SCALE.  Talking with dedicated instructors who are innovating with their teaching approach is such a joyful activity.  I got a lot out of it back then.  It is what hooked me into making the career switch to learning technology.  I had forgotten how much I enjoyed those talks.

The other part, this specific to Ann, is the immediate sense I had of finding a kindred spirit.  Her personal philosophy about the purpose of undergraduate education, something we covered in the preliminary part of the discussion, is essentially identical to mine.  She started right in talking about how over programmed the students are, something I agree with 100%.  She also said that when she was an undergrad she went to the movies on campus a lot, mainly for foreign films.  She also went to a lot of lectures.  I did the same when I was an undergrad.  In other words, much of the education was informal and happened outside of regular courses.  By being so over programmed, the students block this informal sort of learning.  They also miss out on the inquiry into themselves, which is what college should be about, at least in part, even while the students are readying themselves for a life of work that they will enter after graduation.

A good part of that personal inquiry happens by the student having intense discussions with people who are different from her.  Ann talked about spending a lot of time in college with international students who had quite different backgrounds from her.  She is from a small town in Illinois  I did not go through quite the same thing.  Being from NYC I probably had a greater diversity of cultural experiences growing up.  But in college I did spend a lot of time interacting with graduate students where I lived and we would argue (in a friendly way) over anything and everything.  The diversity in point of view really helped my development.

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If my memory is correct on this, I first got to see Ann face to face back in 2008 (according to my email archive).  The connection was via Walt Hurley, who was a campus Distinguished Teacher-Scholar in 2007-08.  Walt and Prasanta Kalita had a weekly workshop on their joint project, Undergraduates Engaged in Inquiry and I became a regular there, wanting to support Walt in this effort.  Ann was a Distinguished Teacher-Scholar the subsequent year.

I attended a workshop she gave on a Spanish course she was then teaching that entailed community service learning.  The idea was for the students to learn Spanish in situ, by being placed at a community organization which had Hispanic members and then negotiating with others on their behalf or providing some service directly to them.  In our recent chat, Ann told me she started this course in response to a campus solicitation for proposals.  A successful proposal would get a small grant to cover the start up costs in developing a service learning course.  Once such a course is underway, there likely are ongoing costs from dealing with leaders of the various community centers that other on-campus courses would not incur.  Yet the grant funds ran out long ago.  Ann manages well nonetheless.  She has very strong relationships with the leadership in the community.  Plus it was evident from the conversation that Ann thoroughly enjoys her interactions with them.  Indeed she now teaches a second such course, providing further support on that point.

Attending Ann’s workshop had a rather profound effect on my thinking at the time.  While I had thought the campus should embrace undergraduate peer mentoring well before that, and I was aware enough about service learning that in my hypothetical/wishful thinking/what-the-campus-should-do about undergraduate education to get students to open up, in a series of posts I referred to this activity as Inward Looking Service Learning, I had no direct experience with service learning nor had I interacted with an instructor who had.  Ann’s workshop convinced me that service learning and peer mentoring really are tied at the hip.  The spirit she conveyed about her own project was precisely the same spirit a campus project on peer mentoring should embrace.

While I had prepared a set of questions for this interview ahead of time that I kept in mind, I wanted the conversation to be natural and free ranging, which I believe it was.  So rather than present this as question and response, I am simply going to continue with the narrative already started and see if the gist of the conversation can be captured that way.

We began with the question of how independent the students are in doing the service learning work.  I was under the impression based on the workshop from 2008 that there was substantial heterogeneity among the students on this score – some were self-starters and would determine what had to be done and then do it, while others waited until being directed to perform a specific task.    Ann concurred.  She said she tries to identify these students ahead of time and makes sure that those who require more supervision are matched with a community provider who is willing to supervise the student.   But then she elaborated that most of the students are apt to be apprehensive at first.  I gather this was both because they might not have been so confident with their Spanish in a real world setting but also because they were in an environment that was novel for them and there were other people they didn’t know previously who were dependent on their efforts, something they were not used to.

Ann indicated that the students got more comfortable over time and more proficient in doing the work.  She told a couple of stories about extraordinary performers who went the extra mile and then some on behalf of their clients.  In addition to the in-class time, students are to spend a minimum of two hours per week performing their community service.  Some students go well beyond that.  At some other point in the conversation I brought up the Campus Strategic Plan, in particular the goal for students to have transformative learning experiences.  Ann was confident that all students in these classes were transformed in a meaningful way as a consequence of the service learning.

However, she reported that the students themselves don’t seem to recognize this and don’t know how to market the experience well on their resumes.  While it may not be a perfect fit, I mentioned the Leadership Minor in this regard.  Much of what the students get as take away from the service learning experience, beyond improvement in their Spanish, is understanding of what being a responsible actor means, how that is determined by the situation and the people involved, and how to live up to that responsibility.  Nowadays, a willingness to accept such responsibility and deliver on it well would be called leadership.  I suspect that many students want to claim they have strong leadership skills, though they are lacking in suitable prior experience.  After taking the service learning course in Spanish, these students can credibly make such a claim.

The students’ lack of awareness of their own learning has a further consequence.  These service learning classes are not required and recently enrollments in them have been declining.  Assuming that the number of those proficient enough in Spanish to be eligible to take one of the courses has not changed over time, we must look elsewhere for an explanation of the drop in enrollments.  In effect, these classes are competing with other courses that the students might perceive better serve them in providing credentials and/or are easier on the students so allow them to invest more heavily in extracurricular activities.  This seems to be the one fly in the ointment about what otherwise is an extraordinarily good experience for students qualified to take it.

Our discussion turned to complementary activities and related issues. One of those is technology in support of service learning.  I was a bit surprised to hear Ann say that it was hard for her to get what she wanted from Campus service providers, whether in CITES or in ATLAS, because there service has been standardized to such an extent that they are not ready or willing to address out-of-the-box requests.  She as been such a friend of IT over the years, such as recently serving on the search committee for the new campus CIO.  I must have mentioned in response that I teach with Blogger now and for the student blogs most of them also use Blogger, which they access with a non-university Gmail account.  I use an LMS only for communication about grades and to post the handful of documents that should not be made public.

For her part Ann uses a Wiki.  She mentioned that in the context of trying to push some of the course administration work onto the students and the community providers they work with.  In particular, they schedule the sessions.  Ann doesn’t have to be involved in those transactions.  If occurred to me that I’ve heard of such use before, at a brown bag jointly given by Joe Grohens and Norma Scagnoli.  This suggests the peer mentoring project should compile a list of tricks and techniques for lessening the administrative burden on the instructor and shifting it onto the students.  That will help to take the dread out of teaching such courses and also encourage the mindset where the students willingly accept this sort of responsibility.

I asked Ann whether these courses could survive in her absence.   Though this is unlikely to happen in the near future as Ann is tied to Champaign-Urbana for family reasons, she responded to two different hypothetical situations.  One was about taking a leave for a year.  The other was about finding a job at a different university.  Ann was quite confident that there is sufficient redundancy in the course from graduate students who have taught it with her and from a textbook she has authored which gives detail on how each class session should work that a one-year absence by here would be no problem at all.

Longer term, however, the course would not sustain.  Ann is the glue that holds it all together.  She possess many specific entrepreneurial skills that are likely hard to replicate, particularly the trust of the community leaders who have participated in the service learning over the years.  What Ann told me was consistent with my own teaching experience with undergraduate peer mentors.  I did that starting in summer 1996 and continued with it through spring 2001, though I didn’t teach every semester once I became an administrator, so the practice was restricted to when I did teach.  Ultimately, I went to 100% time as administrator.  After that I stopped teaching the large class.  The practice of using peer mentors in that class ended at the same time.

There is something of a double edged sword here.  One the one hand, to the extent that others on campus perceive these service learning courses in Spanish to be of high caliber, Ann’s reputation gets enhanced and she gets viewed as a valuable member of the campus community, which she undoubtedly is.   On the other hand, if the activity is sufficiently valuable you’d think it would be in the campus interest to sustain it by not having it so dependent on one critical person.  I suppose this sort of dilemma manifests in many other ways on campus.  It had Ann and me scratching our heads about the implications for the peer mentoring project.  At some point in the future, as I understand it, I’m to pass the reins for the project to CITL staff.  I wonder how that might happen.

The conversation with Ann was quite illuminating.  I am grateful for the time she spent with me.  I hope subsequent conversations of this sort will be just as rewarding.