Service and Learning and Research
When I arrived at Penn and West Philadelphia almost 27 years
ago (gulp!), one of the first things I did was to figure out a service project
I could get involved in. I ended up in a
mentoring program in which every Thursday afternoon I would go to the local
elementary school, pick up my designated 4th grade student, hang out
with him for the day, and drop him off by dinner. It was an early education into West
Philadelphia life from the perspective of a 10-year-old kid living in the hood,
attending a crumbling and underfunded public school (which was eventually
shuttered), and dealing with siblings and bullies and poverty and peer
pressure. It was, in short, way more
valuable to me than I was to him (although I hope he still remembers the good
times we had and the answers I tried to give to all of his questions about
life).
I took for granted that I would find service and learning opportunities
like this on an urban college campus, but I now know that Penn was an early
innovator on what is now called “service learning,” which is actually the integration
of three things that matter at a big-city university: service to and engagement
with the community around it, education of the students who come through its
doors, and research for the faculty who are employed at it.
Integration is not only good for efficiency – why do three
things when you can do one? – but also for effectiveness. For institution and individual alike,
fulfillment of purpose comes from seeing how the real world works, and in the
real world service and education and research ought not be separate
things. (See here for an article that
laments the woeful state of public administration programs due to a perception
that they don’t teach people how to, you know, actually get things done in the
real world of politics and legislative bodies and city halls).
All well and good, you may argue, if you intend to pursue a
career in academia or sociology or be an urban pastor (or, say, run an economic
consulting firm that sits at the intersection of analytics, policy, and
strategy in urban places). But I would
respond that the integration of service and education and research is vitally
important to a much wider range of institutions and individuals. For institutions located in all kinds of
communities and not just big cities, there is an increasing awareness of the
need to engage with, provide benefit to, and have a real relationship with the
surrounding community. Place matters,
and the school that teaches and researches without connection to the place it
is in is teaching and researching in a vacuum, which increasingly will no
longer cut it.
Similarly, students who learn and professors who research,
without a real touch with the community they are in, are missing out on a real
opportunity to grow, independent of whether their long-term aspirations are in
similar kinds of communities. After all,
isn’t a big reason for our growing bipartisanship an unwillingness to walk a
mile in someone else’s shoes? True
diversity isn’t just the presence of differences nor is it the abdication of
our unique and particular perspective, but rather the acknowledgement of the
value of all of those differences in shaping (and at times changing) our unique
and particular perspective.
I am delighted that my alma mater continues to lead in this
area of integration of service, learning, and research, and that just about every
other school in this country now has some such sort of curricular or
extra-curricular offering. We are better
– our communities, our current scholars, and our future leaders – for it.
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