Cultivating a Dedication to Ethical Leadership and Civic Responsibility:
Reflections on Service Learning in Political Science in a Small Department
From Mission to Outcomes: An Impossible Journey?
As recent conversations within the discipline show, there is growing awareness that
training in political science has implications beyond the training of future campaign workers,
aspiring law students, and public policy advocates.
Indeed, political science in an advanced
democracy takes place within a particular historical-social-political context, and more often than
not, reflects the conditions of that context. As faculty in a small department within a Midwestern
liberal arts college, we have taken recent curriculum reform as an opportunity to consider what
may appear to be two competing imperatives: college mission and the discipline of political
science and all of the methodological, theoretical, and content objectives associated with a strong
undergraduate program of study. How does one serve concurrently the needs of students of
politics and students of the college mission when one is particularly constrained by resources,
time, and sometimes apparently conflicting educational objectives? Service learning pedagogy
emphasizing specific civic dispositions, as well as conceptual understandings, is an essential tool
in our arsenal of curricular and co-curricular experiences that assist us in meeting these
challenges.
The challenge of balancing college mission and disciplinary outcomes has its origins in
major college curricular reform in preparation for our most recent accreditation process. While
the college adopted much of the language of student learning outcomes as early as the mid-
1990s, assessment of student learning outcomes had not been fully integrated into the college
1
The recent publication by leading lights of the discipline on issues of civic education and democratic practice in the
United States is a clear indicator of a disciplinary concern with these issues. See Stephen Macedo, et. al.,
Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005).
McKinlay & Lopez 2
Draft – Not for Citation
Convention