Biology students have learned the basics of biology in department courses and have often taken enrichment courses in other more service-oriented departments such as Forestry & Wildlife or Entomology. We believe it is important to create a connection between theory and practice, with a grounded service oriented project that is both valued by the community and a good learning experience for the student. Students are perfectly situated to be applying the latest information in the field. Often, industry or their first job gets the benefits of the latest technology and thinking of newly minted graduates. It is entirely appropriate to encourage a students interest in public service, and a local community project is a convenient nearby laboratory for practicing this aspect which could become a habit.
The Writing in Biology course is part of the Junior Year Writing Program and is meant to provide students with an opportunity to practice writing in their discipline. The guidelines for the Junior Year Writing Program suggest that students write 4 to 5 papers during the semester. A significant challenge in teaching the writing program is finding ways to convince students to approach writing, not purely as an academic exercise, but instead to tackle a real project and to write for a real audience. We propose to use Community Service Learning (CSL) as a means to find a rich array of authentic projects for students to write about.
In the Biology Department, the writing course is taught in 3 to 5 sections per semester by several faculty. There are no guidelines in the department for teaching the writing course. Traditionally, each faculty member has brought their own unique perspective to the section or sections that they teach. Over the past several years, some of the instructors have begun to explore writing in the broader sense of communication in biology and acknowledging the increasing role of technology in communication, including word processing software, communication software (ftp, web, email, blog, etc.), collaboration software (wikis and threaded discussion), and presentation software. Others teach more of a technical seminar, asking students to write frequently. This provides a range of potential experiences for students, but there is often no way for students to discover ahead of time (other than through word-of-mouth) which section might be most interesting for them.
We envision CSL learning eventually becoming a core experience for the writing course in biology. One effect will be to institutionalize communication among the faculty who teach different sections of the course. Secondly, it will provide a mechanism for students to learn about the different instructors and make more informed choices when selecting a section of the course.
The writing course is currently taught by 5 faculty in the department. Three and possibly another have already committed to trying the CSL approach. The other does not wish to participate immediately, but is interested in following the progress of the project. We anticipate that our framework and website will be attractive to new faculty that rotate into the course and that over time, the CSL component will simply become an expectation of teaching the writing course.
We envision CSL projects in which student groups partner with members of the community to perform research, either as literature review or original data gathering (through performing observations, measurements, surveys, or interviews) and creating a final product that will serve a useful community service goal and be published in a form that subsequent sections can study it and use it as a model for replication or further study.
We propose that the CSL component of the course be comprised of three components: a CSL proposal, a CSL project, and a reflective essay. This will provide a common base for the instructors to use in meeting and talking about the class, but will preserve the first four or five weeks of the semester for faculty to use to introduce their own perspective on writing in biology.
The CSL proposal is envisioned as a group project that will identify a project that the entire class could undertake. Each proposal will require preparing a comprehensive rationale for the project and defining roles, or subprojects, for each group to accomplish to complete the CSL project. This will include contacting potential partners in the community and seeking input regarding the proposed project. All of the students in each section will read all of the proposals for that section and review them to rate their importance and feasability. Drawing from the reviews, the instructor will select one proposal to carry out as a project.
The CSL project will require student groups to accomplish the community service subprojects described in the proposal. Each group of students will accept one subproject as described in the original proposal. Upon completion, each group will submit its component of the final report and offer a brief presentation at a public meeting that will hopefully include the community partners.
At the end of the semester, students will write a reflective essay on their experiences detailing what they learned about about writing and about themselves during each of the activities during the semester. We hope that students will be willing to share these publically so that other students can discover each other perspectives, but our experience has been that students are occasionally reluctant to make these available to others.
Finally, we propose to construct a website that will provide for permanent publication of all of the students community service proposals and projects (and reflective essays from students who are willing to share these publically). In addition, each instructor will be asked to include a brief bio and statement of learning goals for their section of the course. Students enrolling in the course will then be able to make informed choices among instructors and sections, choosing the section that is mostly likely to provide the best fit with their interests. This will have the added benefit of allowing each section to specialize around topics of interest the entire class and form more cohesive groups around these areas of interest.
A critical factor in planning and evaluating the progress and outcomes of the CSL course component will be regular meetings among the faculty teaching in the course. The instructors will meet prior to the semester, conduct monthly meetings during the semester, and have a final meeting after the end of the semester. At the final meeting, the faculty will present an analysis of the reflective essays written by the students in their sections, identifying features of the course that worked well and others that seemed irrelevant or problematic. The community partners who participated during the semester will be invited to the final meeting in order to solicit their perspectives on what was accomplished and how to improve the process during the following semester.
The instructors already have a lot of ideas regarding the kinds of projects our students might undertake and we describe several below. At the same time, an important goal of our implementation is that we want our students would come up with their own projects and make their own connections with the community. We believe this will become considerably easier over time an there is an increasingly large library of previous work to examine.
One class of potential projects involves local ecology of Amherst conservation land. The Amherst Community and the State require environmental assessment for maintenance of local Ponds and Conservation Areas. It would benefit the community to create trailguides, inventory species of plants, indentify invasive species locations, and conduct counts of migratory birds, breeding birds, or butterflies. Pond owning associations need regular maintenance of their wetland ponds which require requests to the Local (e.g. Amherst) Conservation Commission. There are three such pond owning associations within the Amherst region, two of which are involved with pond maintenance proposals regularly. Students could be involved with a cataloging of the plants and animals of the pond drainage areas, or some other aspect of commonland conservation to be specified by the associations. A web page database of photographic records of species and dates of observation would allow for a long term record that could be added to and maintained as a learning experience by each subsequent class. The web page catalog of previous topics and reports could invite revisitation of the project by future classes.
Another class of potential projects involves biomedical issues and public health. Many students are interested in health and medical issues. The challenges in managing projects in this area are greater, due to issues of privacy and liability, but some local medical organizations, such as Tapestry Health Systems and local schools could provide opportunities for students to create reports on health issues, draft and write brochures, or create public service announcements regarding health topics.
During Spring 2004, Brewer is pilot-testing how the proposal, project, and reflective essay structure will work for the writing class. So far, the student response has been extremely positive. The course is still early in the proposal process, but some of the projects students have proposed for this semester are very encouraging -- they include conducting migratory bird counts, performing water sampling and testing from local drinking water supply reservoirs, and creating a citizens guide to vernal pools in Amherst.
Last edited on Sunday, March 21, 2004 9:40:15 pm.
  
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