The Anita L. Stafford Community Partnerships and Service Learning Program places an emphasis and priority on service learning courses and activities linked to the curriculum, as prescribed by research on the most effective programs. The program takes into account students' varying levels of interest and experience in community service and provides an entry point for as many students as possible.

• Service Learning Classroom Conference Placements

  Service learning course syllabi integrate hands-on community work with the learning goals for the courses. Readings provided by faculty and partners, personal journals, hands-on experience, class sharing, and reflection on the difference between charity and justice create opportunities for students to see linkages between themselves and the liberation of the poor, marginalized, and oppressed. Regular follow-up by faculty and Community Partnerships staff facilitates repeated engagement in the experiential learning cycle of acting, reflecting, and understanding. Engagement in this learning process helps students find new ways of acting, being and thinking; always remaining open to the next cycle of insights.

  For a list of Service Learning courses being offered during the 2007-08 year, visit the Service Learning Courses page.  Examples of service learning courses taught in the past include:

  • First Year Studies: Developmental Psychology & Educational Perspectives
  • The History of Elemental Mathematics: Pythagoras to Newton
  • Methods of Theater Outreach
  • Divided Nation? Cities and Suburbs in the U.S.
  • Children and Chronic Disease
  • Contemporary Immigration and Immigrant Rights in New York
  • Organized Money or Organized People: Voters, Movements, Media, and Money in U.S. Politics
  • Sound Structures, Social Structures
  • Modern Dance and Social Conscience

• Co-curricular Placements

  Students interested in community service -- not related to a service learning course -- can talk with staff and review informational files and a database to identify placements that meet their personal interests and needs. Faculty also refer students to the Community Partnerships and Service Learning Office to find placements that might enhance conference work. Community Partnerships staff and students have regular contact to discuss co-curricular placement issues and experiences to encourage repetition of the experiential learning cycle of acting, reflecting, and understanding. Examples of community placements include tutoring in schools and agencies, human rights monitoring of welfare recipients, drug treatment centers and needle exchanges, immigrant assistance, and others.

• Service Learning Trips

  To give students a "lived" perspective on social and cultural issues, Community Partnerships and Service Learning plans experiential immersion trips during school breaks. Most trips are connected to specific courses which provide an academic context for the experiences and people encoutered on the trips. The trips focus on communities in need of or working toward social change. Staff and students meet for several months prior to many of the trips to prepare. Reading, studying background information on history and cultural norms, and building a sense of the community within the travel group are all parts of the preparation. Immersion trips in the past include a Mohawk Native American community in NY State; Nicaragua; the US-Mexican border; Appalachian communities in West Virginia; and the Kensington Welfare Rights Center in Philadelphia. 

• Student Advising and Sponsorship

  The Community Partnership Office supports student activism by sponsoring students to attend conferences, protests, and rallies, advising student organizations, and suggesting new service opportunities. Students are encouraged to engage in social action around issues that are of personal interest.