(Page 19 of 20) - Advancing Undergraduate Service Learning and Community-Based Research at a Large Public Research University: The University of Wisconsin-Madison Morgridge Center for Public Service authored by Rouse, Mary. and Sapiro, Virginia.

The Center has also worked to create similar leadership and organization among

students by establishing a learning community of students who either work at the Center
part time as peer advisors, undergraduate service- learning fellows or serve on student- led
committees associated with the volunteer activities organizations based at the Wisconsin
Union, such as the Alternative Breaks and Community Services Committees. These
students have serious leadership roles in the Center and around campus, earning the
respect of other students and faculty alike.

Throughout this paper we have outlined the wide range of support services resources

that Morgridge staff and affiliated faculty, students, and community agents have
developed in the few years since establishment. In the end, the successes are suggested in
the numbers. In 2004-05, the timetable includes roughly 80 service- learning courses
compared with about 50 in 2001-02.

There is considerable unfinished business as well. Service-learning and community-

based research is not as widely familiar to faculty as we hope it to be, and these
pedagogies are not as in widespread use as we hope they will be. Although we have made
a beginning in helping to provide the kinds of resources that are necessary to facilitate the
participation of already stretched faculty and programs, the greatest resource that
supports this work is the willingness of many faculty and staff to go beyond the call of
duty. We believe that our work, as in other areas of enriched pedagogy, we need more
resources to provide the time (especially) faculty require to develop new skills and
courses.

There are, of course, many departments and programs in the universit y in which

teaching, or this kind of teaching, does not earn the status and regard that makes it an
activity that is rewarded in the normal systems of academic reward: merit pay,
promotion, tenure and the like. Although many programs value experiential learning as a
component of their educational programs, many others do not. In these cases, service-
learning may be tolerated but not supported; it is an add-on (or worse) for the faculty and
students who participate.

The normal turnover of community agency staff results in lack of understanding and

continuity of s- l and cbr courses, not to mention the all- important personal relationships
established with faculty and other campus personnel. The work of keeping up these
connections is never done, although the more they can be institutionalized in the
agencies, the better.

Another difficulty, which would face any service- learning program, is the mismatch

between academic and community calendars and needs. Universities, of course, work on
semesters, trimesters, or quarters – time frames that begin and end in dramatic ways with
the cycle of months. The rest of the world does not work that way; problems are not
necessarily designed to be solved in 15 weeks, and they do not begin or end at moments
that are convenient for course management.