Colgate students and Pathfinder students during a leadership program activity.
The Max A. Shacknai COVE continues to deepen student understanding of complex social issues by providing opportunities for immersive experiences in environments very different from those available in the local community. Students participate in a series of preparation and reflective activities to create a rich learning opportunity. Alternative break trips are not discrete one-week experiences. In addition to committing to a work-intensive week, students are responsible for attending pre-departure meetings that introduce the participants to the community and organization with which they will be working and the critical issues with which they will be dealing.
Students who participate are civically engaged youth interested in effecting sustainable local and global change through a continued commitment. In total, participants in these programs contributed more than 3,500 hours of direct service to these communities in Fiscal Year ’15.
- Habitat for Humanity Alternative Winter Break Trip, Salem County, N.J.
The service trip was planned and directed by the campus branch of Habitat for Humanity of Salem County, NJ. Volunteers worked on a variety of homebuilding projects such as putting up plasterboard, insulating, and painting.
- Education, Transmedia Activism, and Social Justice Alternative Winter Break Trip, Philadelphia, P.A.
The trip to Philadelphia was intended to reconstitute how one might think about community service and service learning. That is, while models of what it means to do “direct service” (e.g. Disaster Relief, Habitat) are important, we considered what it would mean for us to engage in service through listening, learning, and working through social justice issues through community empowerment with grassroots/activist organizations. Students learned hard skills and theoretical perspectives on responsive ways (e.g., video, art) to engage with communities’ social justice projects. This trip was based around an idea of multiplatform storytelling and, while using media as activism, we participated in a different but incredibly effective kind of “community service.”
- Summary of the Philadelphia trip written by Mark Stern
In January of 2015, a group of 12 students traveled for one week to Philadelphia under the guidance and planning of Mark Stern, assistant professor of educational studies, to work with Scribe Video Center. Scribe was founded in 1982 and remains under the directorship of MacArthur Award recipient, director, and producer, Louis Massiah. Scribe has worked in Philadelphia for many years doing what is called community-based media. They are an organization that is committed to making it possible for communities to tell their own stories through the use of a variety of media including film, video, photography, and radio. Part of the impetus for this trip was to think about different models of what outreach and volunteer education might look like. Responding to some of the literature that students confront in their classes critical of the racial and class-based ways these kinds of trips have traditionally unfolded with privileged students going to help the less-privileged, the model for this trip was to go and learn a few things about how communities are responding to the struggles they face and to help Scribe further their own mission. Louis and Mark spent a few months planning a week-long syllabus that would introduce students to scholarly literature on community-based media production and to some examples of these practices in a global context. Students were given a pre-trip homework assignment to do research on a community-based media project which they would present on the first day of classes. Members from the greater-Philadelphia area also came in to talk with the students about their experiences working with Scribe and how the media they learned to create was received by their communities. Over the past five years, Scribe has been working on three major projects in the city: Precious Places, Community Voices, and Muslim Voices of Philadelphia. We watched a few of these videos to understand how community-based media looked on the screen and to get a feel for how it differs from the kinds of documentary films students are used to seeing, which are usually made by people from outside of the communities that they are engaging with. The big project the group was going to partake in was to go out into the field and interview members from the communities who made films with Scribe in order to have the films and the interviews archived in the Urban Archive at Temple University so that they would be available and accessible to the larger public. Two days in the classroom with scholars from the community, from the University of Pennsylvania, West Chester University, and Temple University primed the students on theory and practice. They went through a hands-on session about how to make recordings in the field, about how to conduct oral history projects, and about how to archive data digitally and materially once they were finished. The next two days had students in traveling across the city in pairs conducting interviews that lasted between one and three hours. Their task was to find out what the making the community-documentary was like, how it was received in the community, and what, if any, changes had come about as a result. Examples of places the students went were as diverse as The New Africa Center to Masjid Muhammed to a legal-assistance not-for-profit called Every Mother is a Working Mother. Each student conducted and transcribed at least two interviews and, on the last day they were with Scribe, a large sharing session took place where we discussed what people found out and how conducting these interviews informed the students’ thinking.Student feedback from this trip was extremely positive. This was a trip where they got both traditional academic learning blended with experiential learning. Rather than going into communities blindly, the students first did research on who they were visiting and what kinds of struggles were being faced by the particular community. The “help” that the students took part in was a small part in a big process of bringing community stories to light and to make sure that they are accessible for future generations. The students presented about their experiences at a Women’s Studies Brown Bag during the spring semester under the title: Oral History as Feminist Methodology.
- Habitat for Humanity in Amarillo, Texas
Habitat for Humanity worked on a variety of homebuilding projects and infrastructural work for future homeowners. Houses are simple, decent, and affordable to low-income families. The goal of Habitat for Humanity is to help solve the global housing crisis and help 48.5 million people living in poverty. One student that participated in the trip wrote of the experience, “I thought I was just going to be learning to build a house this week, but I learned so much more. Traveling with fellow Colgate students to Amarillo, Texas was a long and exhausting trip, but taught me so much about the personal strengths I have and how I can touch others’ lives with these skills. I would never have considered myself a leader before this trip, but Brandon and Marshall were able to find a way to empower me to take a leadership role and succeed, even without knowing how to use a nail gun when we got there. I think the whole group really enjoyed our time in Texas and are sad to leave.
- Leadership Program Development with Pathfinder Village in Edmeston, NY
Students worked with staff at Pathfinder to help develop a Leadership Development program for a post-secondary academy program that Pathfinder is creating for individuals with Down syndrome to be launched in the fall.
These deep immersion experiences are significant to students in terms of their ability to make meaning of what they learn in the classroom through direct application. Students have the opportunity to reflect on their personal values and ethics through the lens of often difficult experiences, leading to profound questions and conclusions.