This past week I had the honor of being part of the California State University (CSU) system’s Engaged Departments Institute on community engagement and service learning in undergraduate science programs, funded by Learn and Serve America. Five CSU campuses sent teams from chemistry, environmental studies and nursing programs to learn more about community engagement as a pedagogy and to create plans for incorporating it into their courses and programs. Service learning has been touted as one of the “high impact practices” by AAC&U and is one of the more prevalent of the high impact practices (see p.10 of the National Survey of Student Engagement’s 2010 annual report).  Helping campuses more deliberately engage students in high impact practices is a major focus of AAC&U’s conferences (see upcoming conference on Student Success), institutes and programs. However, in the STEM disciplines, we don’t often talk much about service learning as one of the pedagogies of engagement (e.g., peer-led team learning, studio classrooms, just-in-time-teaching, problem-based learning, etc.). As it turns out, there are hundreds of examples of programs that incorporate these kinds of activities into their STEM programs – from educational programs in local communities to engineering projects around the globe (go here for some links to resources).

At the institute, I also made some interesting connections between community engagement and the more common engaged pedagogies that are part of the STEM education lexicon. As service learning powerhouses Rick Battistoni (Providence College), Nadinne Cruz (independent practitioner, author and leader), and Tania Mitchell (Stanford University) guided participants through the theory, research and practice that underlie this very popular and powerful pedagogical approach, I was struck by the similarities between it and other engaged pedagogies. For example, it is student-centered and inquiry-based. It is also very deliberately real world focused because students are out in the world, learning within it instead of learning about it in a sterile classroom. How powerful! One campus team proposed a community engagement project as a mechanism to link three general education courses (chemistry, English and mathematics) together for first-year students in connected cohorts at their four-year institution and a partner community college. Students would be enrolled in the three courses simultaneously at each institution, engaged in community projects at the local YMCA, and meet together weekly to connect experiences across the courses and colleges, and in the community.

I also learned that this is a ripe field for further education research in the STEM disciplines. There are many unanswered questions that faculty who engage students in these kinds of programs can undertake. Here are just a few:

1. What are the STEM knowledge and skills learned in these kinds of experiences, and how can they best be measured? AAC&U’s VALUE project has a rubric on community engagement. Does it work in STEM community engagement projects? If so, does it need modification? Are new rubrics required?
2. What is the impact of community engagement in general education courses on scientific literacy and/or quantitative reasoning skills of undergraduate students? What about scientific literacy of the community members who participate with the students?
3. What is the impact of community engagement as a pedagogy for major courses on student retention and completion rates in STEM majors? Success in STEM, in particular for underrepresented students, is a critical issue for colleges and universities around the nation, and perhaps this pedagogy should be added as another tool in our tool chest of effective practices.

I left the institute further energized to continue PKAL’s work to advance “what works” in undergraduate STEM education with new ideas, new knowledge and new connections to the very engaged community engagement and service learning community.

What are your community engagement experiences in STEM courses and programs? Do you know of any studies that connect it to student success and learning outcomes in STEM?

Tags: community engagement, pedagogies of engagement, service learning