NUTS & BOLTS

We didn’t come up with any grand narrative, other than perhaps a sense that the service piece is difficult but vital to our identity.

And, if we work at it, it’s attainable.

After our workshop session Donna Metcalf, who has taught English and journalism at Springfield/Benedictine and other area colleges, surveyed her adult accelerated students.

“When I went over the mission statement last night in my new class, I asked if anyone in fact did volunteer [in the community],” she emailed me the next day. “About five out of 15 students said they did … at their children’s school, at Bible camp, and one lady serves on boards for some of the major organizations in Springfield.”

If Donna’s class is typical, our students are more open to the idea service than either of us would have expected. I have no recommendations about the service piece and no answers, but I think it’s important for us to consider the issue. How do we promote service among our students? In our own lives, for that matter?

Purely by serendipity, a couple of days after the workshop I came across an article headlined “Educating for Responsibility” in Inside Higher Ed, the online newsletter I follow to keep up with trends. In a review of a new collection of essays edited by Howard Gardner of Harvard and titled Responsibility at Work: How Leading Professionals Act (or Don’t Act) Responsibly, the newsletter detailed, among other things, research by Jeanne Nakamura of California’s Claremont Graduate School on colleges “where students perceived the teaching of ethics and responsibility to be as strong as institutional mission statements suggested it would be.”

She found three – Swarthmore College, an East Coast liberal arts college founded by Quakers, Morehouse College of the prestigious historically black Atlanta University complex and Mount St. Mary’s College, a culturally diverse women’s college in Los Angeles founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Said Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschick:

The key, Nakamura writes, is that beyond their identities, the colleges each have an ethos that is communicated to students in many ways — and that this communication comes in specific actions. The “action” part of her findings appears to set these colleges apart from many others that appear to do a lot of talking about these issues, but where students don’t feel a real push about service or values.

In all three cases, with different ways of conveying the message, the matching of college’s ideology with specific actions was key in instilling values of service to community to students, Nakamura writes. Students associated their sense of feeling obliged to society in their life choices from those actions.

How would our students reply if an off-campus researcher came to Springfield/Benedictine and asked how well we act on the values in our mission statements? I think we might be pleasantly surprised, but I also think it might be a very good question for us to focus on as we chart our course looking ahead to the next accreditation cycle. In an extended quotation, Nakamura even suggests some benchmarks:

“I think the same basic questions are worth posing for any institution aiming to cultivate civic and social engagement in the sense of living responsibly with others and doing work that serves others or betters society,” [Nakamura] said. “How can the conditions of daily experience be shifted to support the goals, both in terms of removing obstacles and supporting new patterns? How can you shape or create daily practices and ongoing social relations (with other students, with faculty and staff, with the community), and less obviously how can you organize physical space and structure time, so that students are able to practice’ responsibility? What does the institution already do well, and can ‘practicing responsibility’ be integrated with it? What is the institution itself modeling for students?”

At first I thought I’d surfed into a sequel to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy instead of Inside Higher Ed. But there it was. On Aug. 19, just a few weeks after the U.S. Education Department’s push for nationwide standardized testing apparently stalled in the U.S. Senate, at least for the time being, “on the grounds that the nation’s colleges and universities — two-year and four-year, public and private, exclusive and open enrollment — and their students are far too varied to be responsibly and intelligently measured by any single, standardized measure (or even a suite of them),” the newsletter’s government affairs writer Doug Lederman reported the following:

... the thirst among politicians and others seeking to hold colleges and universities more accountable for their performance is powerful, and it is not merely an American phenomenon. Proof of that can be found in the fact that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has convened a small group of testing experts and higher education policy makers who have met quietly in recent months to discuss the possibility of creating a common international system to measure the learning outcomes of individual colleges and university systems, along the lines of the well-regarded test that OECD countries now administer to 15-year-olds, the Program for International Student Assessment.