CSUMB’s campus opened in 1995 on the site of a decommissioned military base near Monterey, California

When California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) was created on the site of the decommissioned Fort Ord in 1995, the university had an unusual opportunity to experiment with new approaches to undergraduate education. Without entrenched campus structures or a long institutional history, educational planners were able to design the school's curriculum around specific skills and areas of knowledge that they believed all graduates would need in the twenty-first century. This curriculum identifies thirteen key outcomes of undergraduate education, or “University Learning Requirements."

One of these requirements, community participation, has provided impetus for the institutionalization of service learning on campus. Unlike many other colleges and universities—where service learning often is at the outskirts of the curriculum, limited to elective courses or extracurricular activities—CSUMB has integrated service into both general education and the major. As a result, CSUMB students contribute thousands of hours of service in the community each year, helping local organizations meet vital needs while also learning firsthand about how social problems intersect with what they learn in the classroom.

Building “Community Participation”

Service-learning programs at CSUMB are coordinated by the campus’s Service Learning Institute, which is headed by Professor Seth Pollack. The institute’s work is meant to foster in students a civic orientation, an appreciation of difference, an awareness of social justice, and increased self-awareness—all qualities that will help CSUMB graduates not just to contribute constructively to their future workplaces and communities, but also to make those places more just and equitable, Pollack says.

The first part of the community participation requirement, based in general education, typically is completed in the second semester of a student’s first year or sometime in the sophomore year. To complete this part of the requirement, students take an introductory, four-credit class from the service learning department—most often Introduction to Service in Multicultural Communities—and spend thirty hours serving at a community organization or school.

The nature of the service students perform in the introductory course varies according the theme of the section in which they enroll. Some of the sections focus on social issues like hunger and homelessness, educational equity, or disease, while others focus directly on impoverished communities in nearby cities like Seaside or Salinas. Depending on local needs, students from these classes might find themselves working at a food bank, tutoring middle school students, serving at a health center, or collaborating with a Latino community organization. Back in the classroom, students reflect on their experiences and examine the dynamics of social privilege and oppression through readings and discussion. All of the classes work toward the ultimate goal of developing what CSUMB describes as “self-reflective, culturally aware, and responsive community participants."

CSUMB students paint a mural for “Soledad Street Beautification Day” in nearby Salinas.

Defining the Content of Service Learning

The second part of CSUMB’s community participation requirement—which is based in the major—raises important questions about the applicability of service learning to advanced academic work. Can service make a unique contribution to advanced studies in the major, or must it simply be an add-on requirement? What role can service play in disciplines that seem entirely divorced from the social issues that are typically the focus of community participation?

Seth Pollack addresses these questions by arguing that service must be understood “as a way to help students develop a sense of how they as professionals in their future fields will address issues of social inequality.” Approaching service learning from this perspective, Pollack says, means viewing it as a “content area” in itself rather than simply as a useful pedagogical tool or a way to encourage community service.

Upper-level service-learning courses thus focus not on teaching traditional academic content through a service-based pedagogy but on exploring how contemporary social problems come to bear on work in different fields. As an example of what this means in practice, Pollack cites CSUMB's integrated science program. It might not be pedagogically effective to teach something like organic chemistry through community service, he says, but it does make sense to require students to think critically about the social and environmental implications of chemistry and about the social responsibilities of professional chemists and other scientists.

According to Pollack, this emphasis on discipline-specific social issues is part of what makes CSUMB’s approach to service learning so different from that taken by many other institutions. It is also why CSUMB has no difficulty incorporating service-based courses into departments like mathematics, business, and technology. Math students, Pollack points out, need to learn about the correlation between achievement in math and social privilege and about the role math plays as a “gateway subject” to future success; business students can benefit from learning about community economic development and the importance of being a “socially responsible entrepreneur”; and technology students should be aware of the “digital divides” that still exist along lines of class, race, and gender.

Such content, of course, lends itself to service: even students in fields that do not typically focus on social issues can learn from tutoring students at an underperforming middle school or collaborating with a community agency on a research project. Finally, Pollack says, the kinds of partnerships that stem from such a content-based approach are “much more in line with community issues and concerns” than those that focus exclusively on the pedagogical benefits of service learning.

Evaluating Success

For the past decade, the Service Learning Institute has been using student questionnaires to gauge the success of its programs. The evaluation data show, with great consistency year to year, that service learning has changed student attitudes and challenged their thinking.

In end-of-semester evaluations from spring 2005, for example, 91 percent of students who had just completed the general education community participation requirement reported feeling “more comfortable participating in the community,” and 87 percent said they felt “a stronger commitment to being involved” in their communities. Ninety-one percent said that the experience motivated them to listen to perspectives different from their own and 87 percent said that it led them to think about social justice in new ways, while just 14 percent reported feeling that they would have learned more by spending “more time in the classroom instead of doing service.”

Faculty have also responded positively to CSUMB’s efforts to incorporate learning about social justice, diversity, and civic engagement into the curriculum. “There’s a clear sense,” Seth Pollack says, that teaching such content through service learning is now “a part of the academic program’s responsibility.” The work of the faculty, and of the community organizations they partner with, will remain essential as CSUMB continues to engage its students—as future professionals—with the social “content” of service learning.

Visit CSUMB online for more information about the work of the Service Learning Institute.

For information about AAC&U’s work on service learning and civic engagement, see the Center for Liberal Education and Civic Engagement and the civic engagement resources page.