Higher education should be a means of elevating community while developing individual potential — to making a difference for others even as you make a difference for yourself.  

Yet as a culture we view a college education in terms of utility to the individual student, to see it principally as a means of personal economic and social elevation. Author Parker Palmer argues the ethic of competitive individualism that this approach to education fosters “breeds intellectual habits, indeed spiritual instincts, that destroy community.” But there is another approach being implemented nationally and, to a limited extent, at Ithaca College.

For the past two decades, students, community partners and teachers countrywide have been developing a pedagogy most commonly known as service-learning or community-based learning. Service-learning is the idea that higher education has enormous untapped potential for helping transform communities and an obligation to offer students opportunities to learn through collaboration with community partners.  No matter how masterfully done, teaching that takes place only inside classrooms can never bridge the gap between theory and practice, between college and the “real” world. Internships offer the real-world experience but are still framed in terms of career advancement for the individual.  Service-learning gets students “out of the bubble” (a very common way students — especially those who come from privilege and who live on campus — frame their higher education experience).

At schools like the University of Illinois and San Francisco State, students are taking courses that are rigorously academic and offer an opportunity to think about academic questions through a service-learning experience. Every discipline in the curriculum can utilize this pedagogy. Whether it is a computer programming class helping a nonprofit organization redevelop its Web site or an English class working with an after-school theater program learning a Shakespeare play, students have an opportunity to apply what they learn in the classroom and help the community develop new resources. While the opportunities for this kind of learning are still limited here, the college’s students and their community partners have written grants together as part of a writing course, worked to develop new after-school programs at the Southside Community Center and engaged in intergenerational conversations with Longview residents as part of a U.S. history course, to name a few of the service-learning courses of recent years.

When this kind of partnership works, the results for everyone involved are something close to magic: Students feel a greater mastery of the course material, a sense that they have put their education and privilege to good use and an understanding that everyone in the world has something to teach you. Community partners are able to use their resources more effectively; faculty witness more excited and deeply engaged students and experience greater community involvement themselves; the bubble, after all, surrounds all of us to some degree.

Unfortunately, despite the efforts of many faculty to develop service-learning and a clear desire from students and community partners to have more of it, the college lacks even the most basic administrative infrastructure for supporting it.  Many students are craving a way “out of the bubble.”  It is my hope that the administration’s professed commitment to developing community-based learning will soon give new meaning to higher education at Ithaca College.

Michael Smith  is an assistant professor of history. E-mail him at mismith@ithaca.edu.