Category: Uncategorized

Today's guest post is from Kim Vaz-Deville, Professor of Education and Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

• First you can inquire how the student is doing/coping.
• Ask if she or he understands the emails that have been coming out from the department/division/dean's office and academic affairs.
• Many students do not know what to expect for finishing the courses for the end of the semester. Address concerns and if you don’t know that is okay you can follow up with the right sources.
• Let them know what academic supports are in place. Students can create a virtual meeting space that their group can visit whenever they want to study and they may also join an existing study group. They can also contact the relevant Academic Resource Center Coordinators to request a tutor or SI to work with your newly created study group. For more information, students should check their emails from Dr. Holmes sent on March 27, 2020 titled “XULA Zoom Study Groups”. For assistance from the Academic Resource Centers see the email from Dr. Holmes sent on March 17, 2020 titled “Academic Resource Centers - Online Tutoring, Review Sessions, and Resources”.
• You can assign pre-work for the meeting -- tell students what they will need to prepare for the advising session.
• You can reassure them that they are working toward the goals they have set for themselves. No matter what they are hearing or feeling they are moving forward. Though they are learning remotely/online, they are still in a rich educational environment and will learn what is needed for their success. You can remind them how much the faculty care about them.
• While summer classes will be "on-line", this might be a good time to clarify the difference between "remote learning" and "online learning". Currently, if their class was face to face, it is now being offered remotely it includes an expectation that the student will login during the time the course is offered so their professors know they are there.
• In planning for the fall semester, take into account what the summer is going to look like for them. Help them have an academic plan because that will reinforce that there is an endpoint/target.
• If you are using your personal phone and are concerned about maintaining your privacy, you can use Goggle Voice. If you get the app on your phone, you can make work calls from that number.

Sources:

“Best Practices for Serving Students Remotely” Sponsor: eab.com. Thursday, March 26, 2020

“Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: How the COVID-19 crisis is pushing liberal arts programs to cultural and institutional innovation.” Hosted by Christopher Malone, Founding Dean School of Arts and Sciences, Molloy College. Sponsor: Council of Colleges of Arts & Sciences. March 25, 2020

Reyna Romero, Director, Advising Services. College of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Houston and Crystal Guillory, Assistant Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at UHD meeting with Kim Vaz-Deville, Associate Dean College of Arts and Sciences, Xavier University of Louisiana, March 31, 2020

Thanks to all who attended the recent Service Learning (SL)workshop. Your willingness to take the time out of your busy schedules to learn more about this important endeavor is greatly appreciated. The workshop was entitled Service Learning: A Renewalas we (CAT-FD and CSI [the Center for Student Involvement]) are focused on enhancing SL courses and the SL experience on Xavier’s campus. Along those lines, we have streamlined the process of SL course proposal submission, with proposals now submitted online. The advantage of submitting proposals is an “SL” designation for the respective course on Banner Web. Proposal submission also allows us to anticipate and provide appropriate logistical support for SL courses.

As the Faculty in Residence -SL, I will be working with faculty to ensure that SL courses are pedagogically sound and achieve course learning objectives. I will also focus on whether reflection is integral piece of SL and, with a great deal of help from Ms. Kendra Warren, provide logistical support. The overall goal of proposal submission is not to “accept” or “reject” any given proposal. Rather it is to work with faculty to ensure a sound, effective, and smooth (as possible) SL project.

At the Service Learning: A Renewalworkshop we discussed the importance of developing a SL project with a community partner in mind, as SL consists of collaboration with a community partner; a collaboration from which the community partner clearly benefits. We also focused on the importance of reflection in SL. This reflection can take many forms (e.g., a journal, class discussion, and/or paper assignment), should be a component of the course grade, and occur consistently throughout the semester. In essence SL should be an integral component of the course and course grade. However, that component should not merely consist of attendance at the SL site.

SL can take many forms, ranging from direct SL (e.g., tutoring middle school students) to research-based SL (e.g., writing a guide on available community resources). The form of SL is not necessarily important. Whether SL is consistent with the nature of the course and fosters achievement of learning outcomes is.

I look forward to hearing from and supporting faculty in their SL endeavors. If you have questions, are interested in submitting a SL proposal, or are curious about other upcoming SL activities, please let me know (lschulte@xua.edu).

As I sit in my CAT-FD office I wonder what to focus on for my first blog. An idea finally comes to me – how did I “get here.” Not physically, but what stirred my interest in the Faculty in Residence – Service Learning position. What path did I take?

I start thinking back to how I first became involved in service learning. It was via a FaCTS (Faculty Community of Teaching Scholars) group, the focus of which was sustainability. To be quite honest I don’t know whether my interest in FaCTS stemmed from the stipend offered or an authentic interest in sustainability (or service learning for that matter). In any event I applied, taking what was perceived as a different approach to sustainability. I was teaching Positive Psychology at the time (I am also teaching Positive Psychology this semester) and wondered whether students might be considered a sustainable resource. One could argue that students endure a great deal throughout the semester. There are ups and downs, failures and triumphs, and certainly many challenges. To succeed students must persist, with what could be argued as, dwindling resources. How might students sustain their personal resources and psychological well-being?

In Positive Psychology service learning required students to select an area of themselves that they desired to strengthen, with inspiration coming from the twenty-four character strengths developed by Peterson and Seligman (2004). Students completed the Values in Action (VIA) survey to determine the relative ranking of their 24 strengths and selected a strength to focus on throughout the semester.

How did service learning come into play? Example strengths include optimism, forgiveness, and bravery. Qualities that many senior citizens display. Thus the idea was that senior citizens would serve as role models and mentors for change. The service learning project grew from there, with students visiting senior centers every week – interacting, sharing, and just hanging out with seniors. Reflection was an essential component of the project, with students submitting a weekly service-learning journal consisting of general reflections/observations and requiring students to apply specific course concepts to their experiences and interactions with seniors.

The course and associated service learning project was time consuming, challenging, and required a great deal of monitoring and organization. The results were incredibly rewarding. Meaningful connections were made, in depth discussions occurred, and greater understanding of course concepts facilitated. Thus, while I may not have been initially interested in service learning for service learning sake, through this and subsequent projects I have certainly come to understand the many benefits of service learning, how it enriches student experience, and the importance of creating a service-learning project that is pedagogically sound.

I look forward to serving as the CAT-FD Faculty in Residence – Service Learning. My initial goals include learning more about service learning (at XU, on other campuses, and empirical findings associated with service-learning), ensuring that service learning projects are pedagogically sound, streamlining the process of developing service learning courses and projects, and continued incorporation of service learning in my courses. I anticipate that my goals in this role will evolve, look forward to working with the XU and greater New Orleans community, and am excited to take this journey of discovery.

Reference:

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association; New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.

A surprising success story has emerged at Xavier this semester in a service-learning course, and this time it's my course! Both the surprise and the success have come on several levels. The successes have been not just the level of student engagement in the community work, but the degree of ownership the students have taken in the work and its real-life positive effects. And the surprise has been theirs and mine, in the life of its own the course has taken on, and the directions that life has led us.

Education in Literature and in Action, XCOR 1011, has its roots in a composition and literature course I taught in the English Department.  I noticed that several of the short stories I taught had education as a theme, stories such as Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson," Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," and more recent stories such as Leila Aboulelea's "The Museum." Although I had taught this course as a service-learning course in the past, I hadn't lately for several reasons, none of which were particularly valid, yet my reasons were indicative of the types of reasons why teachers choose not to teach service-learning: time, pedagogical inertia, and the pull of a culture that supports service-learning largely on a theoretical level.

This situation changed, slightly, perhaps, with the redesigning of the core curriculum, and the creation of a new category of courses that would be three-credit-hour courses, 1000 level, whose main purpose was to explore the meaning of Xavier's social justice mission. While service-learning would not be required, the nature of the courses lent itself to service-learning, and it was expected that several among the first batch of offerings would be service-learning, thus ensuring a cohort of teachers operating under at least the same course prefix, if not within a department or division.

Most appealingly, though, the XCOR courses would be under the direction of one faculty member, who actively encouraged service-learning. This small organizational difference illuminated a key point about institutional service-learning culture for me: while "faculty-driven" is an ideal, in practice the active encouragement of faculty members in leadership positions is crucial, if for no other reason than the dissolution of ambiguity in faculty's minds. How likely is a faculty member to engage in service-learning, when she or he isn't even sure if the faculty leader in their area knows what it is? And if faculty leaders mention it never, rarely, or in passing, then it follows for faculty to translate ambiguity as lack of support, or at least indifference. Once faculty leaders begin to repeat service-learning as a point of action, then the layers of institutional support begin to reenforce each other: student affairs, academic affairs, departments and divisions, in a virtuous cycle that faculty can sense, even in its infancy.

These changes led me to rethink my literature and composition course as an XCOR, service-learning course. The premise was fairly simple: to study short stories and essays dealing with experiences in education, to tutor in a local elementary school, and to reflect on what the texts and the work, along with their own experience, tell us about education as an aspect of social justice. As with many of our best laid plans, the simplicity of the premise quickly proved illusory once class began. From a theoretical standpoint, to maintain a cohesive purpose between the strands I'd laid out proved more rhetorically challenging than I'd anticipated. From a practical standpoint, as mainly a writing teacher, I was underprepared to deliver a lecture course whose content didn't consist largely of close attention to student writing. In comp, half my "lectures" are delivered with student writing displayed on a screen. What would take the place of that half that would be of equivalent value to the purpose of the course?

Although the course was a bumpy ride over the first few weeks, as new courses or first-time-taught courses often are, what put the course on track, and opened it up in ways I hadn't anticipated, wan't simply the passage of time, but rather the start of  the community work. After-school tutoring in a local middle school became a kind of meta-text, a lens through which to "read" not just the other texts, but the entire first-year-experience at an HBCU with a social-justice mission.

In my next post, I will detail the project and my students' experiences with it. This next post will be my last contribution to this blog as Faculty-in-Residence for Service-Learning here at CAT+FD, a position I've held for five years. I hope it will serve as a fitting cap to my rewarding and enlightening work here.