When I joined the faculty of the Department of Political Science at William
Jewell College, a quality, comprehensive liberal arts with a Christian heritage, I
understood that the institution’s academic mission encourages professors to explore faith-
informed perspectives in their courses when and where appropriate to the subjects that
they teach. A dialogue among different faith perspectives, as well as among other points
of view, is encouraged as part of the learning process. A central part of the mission of the
Department of Political Science is to use the discipline to teach students not only about
how the world works but to challenge and equip them to think about how it ought to
work.
Students at the college routinely do volunteer work in the greater Kansas City
area through different clubs and student organizations. Upon joining the faculty, I was
particularly impressed by the service orientation of both students and professors. The
college offered a service learning program at the time, and still does, but service learning
was not broadly integrated into the college curriculum in any meaningful sense. The
institution is now working hard to make sure that students are exposed to at least one or
more service learning opportunities during their studies at William Jewell. So how did I
come to use service learning?
As a political scientist, I am a specialist in comparative politics; however, I also
have Ph.D. level training in American politics. At William Jewell, I teach courses in both
subfields. As discussion of service learning intensified on the campus, I began to look for
a place to integrate a service component into one of my courses. In comparative politics,
this is not so easy to do. My course on Congress & the Presidency, however, presented a
more promising venue. At the time I was looking for a way to ginger up the course a bit.
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Convention