Local Political Involvement and Service Learning
At the University of Iowa, 2005-06 is the “Year of Public Engagement” where “[d]uring
this year, the University community will be encouraged to intensify its efforts and sharpen its
focus on engagement with the public and public issues at the local, state, national, and
international levels” (University of Iowa, 2006). Putting aside the question of whether one year is
enough to do “engagement” justice, Iowa’s move is just the latest in a series of efforts by
colleges and universities to do something to better connect students, faculty, and staff to the
community at large. The idea of engagement has spawned a mini industry of late as institutions
of all types struggle with the question of what it means to be “engaged.” While this is in fact a
very big question, our paper focuses on a small, but critical, portion. We are interested in how
political science can use “civic” engagement options to enhance coursework and to reinforce not
just involvement in a community, but involvement in the politics of a community. While not
negating the importance of working in soup kitchens, or cleaning up polluted streams, we
suggest that these activities do not, by themselves, connect students to the civic – that is, the
political – in their communities.
A political science concern for civic engagement is not really new, though perhaps the
use of the language of “service learning” and “civic engagement” is. Political science, after all, is
often the home of various internship programs, semesters in Washington and state capitals, and
other “hands-on” projects such as campaign internships. If any department has been historically
“engaged” it is political science. Having said this, however, it is not clear at all that political
scientists have in general given a lot of thought to how concepts from service learning can
directly inform the way we teach our courses. It is one thing to simply send students out to
volunteer with campaigns; it is another to fully integrate the experience of campaign work with
the material actually taught in class.
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Convention