Dr. Counts and Dr. Vowell attend the ground breaking ceremony for the Nature's Basket University Community Garden located at West and 10th streets, created as a service learning project for Dr. Bailey' s Sociology of Food class. Students lead every aspect of garden design and creation, basing their work on their studies in food security.

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The Community Wide Service Learning Initiative

A collaboration of The Volunteer Center of Grant County & Western New Mexico University

The Community Wide Service Learning Initiative has been established as a collaborative project between The Volunteer Center of Grant County and designated as a Service Learning Site of the New Mexico Service Learning Network, a program of the NM Forum for Youth in Community The Community Wide Service Learning Initiative is creating the network of instructors and community educators to successfully deliver a way of making the world a place to learn.

Service Learning at WNMU engages students in structured community service activities and guided reflection as a part of the academic curriculum. Service learning gives students real-world experiences to enhance their learning while helping to address community needs and foster civic engagement through volunteerism. The components of service learning at WNMU are: (1) intentional and meaningful connections to curriculum, (2) student reflection through thinking, talking and writing about experiences, (3) building and sustaining community partnerships, (4) assessment used to ensure that both learning outcomes and contributions to the community are meaningful

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Dr. Magdaleno Manzanarez's American National Government class holds the first of a series of forums on today's biggest political issues featuring local experts. Students use in-depth research to pick topics and design the forums. Students give back to the community by learning each topic thoroughly and then inviting locals with experience in the debate to speak and answer questions. Students thus inform and interact with the public by sharing what they have learned in classes in a new and imaginative way.

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: Dr. Sharman Russell addresses guests about hunger issues during a dinner to raise awareness about poverty in Grant County. This service learning project was designed and carried out by students of Dr. Emma Bailey's Social Inequality class in order to present student research on hunger statistics in a way most have never seen before. Guests are divided into social classes based on real social statistics for the United States, and their meals reflect their assigned positions of upper, middle, and lower classes. Upper class guests receive multiple courses of high quality foods, while the lowest classes receive small portions of low quality and nutrition. Just like in the U.S., the majority are somewhere in the middle with decent food at decent portions. Participants were also treated to speakers and entertainment based on the themes of hunger and inequality.

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Cari Lemon's 2009 Jump Start Class after a day of service and learning in a local community garden.

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Cari Lemon's 2010 Jump Start Freshmen at the Nature's Basket University Garden

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WNMU's Nature's Basket Garden is run by student volunteers and organizers who have shown that a service-learning project can successfully go beyond a single semester.

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What Is Service-Learning? Service-learning offers a unique opportunity for America's young people -- from kindergarten to university students -- to get involved with their communities in a tangible way by integrating service projects with classroom learning. Service-learning engages students in the educational process, using what they learn in the classroom to solve real-life problems. Students not only learn about democracy and citizenship, they become actively contributing citizens and community members through the service they perform.

Service-learning combines service objectives with learning objectives with the intent that the activity will change both the recipient and the provider of the service. This is accomplished by combining service tasks with structured opportunities that link the task to self-reflection, self-discovery, and the acquisition and comprehension of values, skills, and knowledge content.

For example, if school students collect trash out of an urban streambed, they are providing a service to the community as volunteers; a service that is highly valued and important. When school students collect trash from an urban streambed, then analyze what they found and possible sources so they can share the results with residents of the neighborhood along with suggestions for reducing pollution, they are engaging in service-learning. In the service-learning example, the students are providing an important service to the community AND, at the same time, learning about water quality and laboratory analysis, developing an understanding of pollution issues, learning to interpret science issues to the public, and practicing communications skills by speaking to residents. They may also reflect on their personal and career interests in science, the environment, public policy or other related areas. Thus, we see that service-learning combines SERVICE with LEARNING in intentional ways. There are many other illustrations of how the combination is transforming to both community and students.

This is not to say that volunteer activities without a learning component are less important than service-learning, but that the two approaches are fundamentally different activities with different objectives. Both are valued components of a national effort to increase citizen involvement in community service, and at every age.

What are the Characteristics of Service-Learning?

According to the National Commission on Service learning, service-learning:
• Links to academic content and standards
• Involves young people in helping to determine and meet real, defined community needs
• Is reciprocal in nature, benefiting both the community and the service providers by combining a service experience with a learning experience
• Can be used in any subject area so long as it is appropriate to learning goal
• Works at all ages, even among young children

Service-learning is not:
• An episodic volunteer program
• An add-on to an existing school or college curriculum
• Logging a set number of community service hours in order to graduate
• Compensatory service assigned as a form of punishment by the courts or by school administrators
• Only for high school or college students
• One-sided: benefiting only students or only the community