3)  Each week for two hours, you will do community service work, for a total of about thirty hours for the semester. You may work in any nonprofit agency. You can find placements via the links on the homepage for our course or through your church or other community contacts. I will work individually with each of you to help you find a placement. Working together, we will ensure that your community work is useful to the group you are collaborating with and to your own educational development. The most obvious way to do this is to relate the service learning experience to your major or intended career, and you may also relate the community work to the research or writing that you are doing in your other classes. Working together, we will ensure that the service learning experience is really a learning experience and not merely volunteerism. The Learning Journal and the Semester Project should provide you with opportunities to reflect upon what you are doing and to develop practical skills with researching, writing and working about the problems that affect people’s lives on a daily basis.

4)  Each week you will turn in a Learning Journal (1 page each). You will reflect upon what you are learning, first in your other classes and then in your service work in the community. The journal entries should be written in developed paragraphs with an introduction that establishes a clear focus, purpose or idea for the entry. The conclusion should relate the entry to what you have already learned in this class, in your other courses, and in your weekly work in a nonprofit agency, community work .

You do not have to write your Learning Journals on the prompts listed on the homework page. You may choose one question to write about, or you can write on a related topic. However, you must write focused and developed paragraphs.

5)  For the major assignment for the semester, you may follow up on Exploration of a Field journal entries to write a five to seven page paper examining major trends or opportunities in a field of  study, or you may create a Service Learning Project in collaboration with the school or agency that you are working with.  You may also propose an alternative assignment that seems more useful to you, such as creating a webpage.  In any case, a full draft of the project is due on November 18 to be workshopped in class, and the revision is due in our last class on December 2.

The Exploration of a Field should be useful if you have decided upon a field of study or if you are completely undecided about a major.  You will write learning journals that can be incorporated into the paper: you will interview a person in your field (due October 28), and you will analyze a professional article that examines a major trend in the field or other issues such as employment opportunities in the discipline (due November 4).  These learning journals can be integrated into a five to seven page paper that examines why this field is of interest, what it has to offer you, and how you would like to contribute to work in the area.

The essay should incorporate the work that you did for the interview and the analysis of an article from the field of study, and you may also want to do further reading on trends in the field and/or the programs of study that are required in the relevant majors here at the University of Arizona.  You could even get into the details of the specific courses that you plan to take within this area to develop exactly how your studies will enable you to accomplish your professional goals.  You may also integrate a discussion of the service learning that you did this semester or other community or professional internships that you would like to do.  You may frame the essay in the introduction by characterizing where you are with the process of making a decision about what you want to study and the sort of work that you want to do after graduating, or you may wish to take a less personal approach that focuses on trends in the field of study.

The Service Learning Project should provide you with a practical opportunity to develop the writing and computer skills that we have worked on. For example, you might help plan or assess a webpage for a project or for the school, or you might help a teacher develop a pamphlet or curricular materals.  The project must be useful to you and to the agency. We will discuss the semester project in our individual conferences, on the listserve and in class. I will also be happy to consult with you and your collaborators in the community to help you develop your project. You may use your semester project for another class, but you must get the written permission of the instructor from the other class.

If you would like to propose an alternative to these options, please contact me to make an appointment or come by during office hours from 12 to 2 on Thursdays or 1-2 on Friday.  To email me, click here.