Volunteering takes on a new meaning at Butler University with classes that have a service learning component. This component integrates both the traditional classroom setting and involvement in the Indianapolis community.

Butler has offered service learning since the mid -1990s, but more students will be exposed to the program now because of the Indianapolis Community Requirement, which requires all students to take a course involving active engagement in the Indianapolis community.

Service learning is one route to fulfill the ICR.

“The experience in the community is directly related to the academic learning goals,” said Donald Braid, the director of the Center for Citizenship and Community.

Service learning courses vary widely, but each class meets in the classroom and requires 20 hours of community service throughout the semester.

Spanish professor Terri Carney has taught one of the service learning courses for students enrolled in Spanish courses.

“(The purpose of service learning is) to connect the real world with the academic world, which has traditionally been sort of separated,” Carney said. “It has a profound effect on the vast majority.”

Senior Alex Tallentire has been involved with service learning most of his Butler career. He has been a student in a service learning class, a student advocate for community engagement and a teaching apprentice for a service learning course.

Tallentire said he is particularly excited about the  service learning partnership with Nora Elementary School. At the school, 40 percent of students are English as a New Language students.

Butler students will go to the school during its lunch hour to interact with and help ENL students with homework. Tallentire said it is important to have consistent interaction with the students and said 20 hours is needed.

Butler service learning contains many different ways to  engage the community.

A few of the partnerships that service learning has are with the Kaleidoscope Youth Center, the Martin Luther King Community Center and the Indianapolis School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Butler students go to these places and work with youth and seniors through tutoring, mentoring and providing companionship.

Sophomore Molly Swigart said her service learning class met with an Iraqi refugee family and also went to the Nur-Allah Islamic Center to go to service and volunteer at the weekend school.

Tallentire said students may find difficulty fitting the service learning requirement into their schedules.

“The one initial hesitation of students is, ‘Well, I’m not going to have time for this,’” Tallentire said.

Margaret Brabant, a professor of political science, has been using service learning pedagogy since the mid-1990s.

“Our classrooms are enhanced and enriched by the kind of work the students are doing in the community,” Brabant said.

More than 30 service learning courses are offered now at Butler.

Brabant said the virtues students acquire from their service learning experience are courage, empathy and humility.

“The ripple effect of this is extraordinary,” Brabant said.

Changes in Butler University’s core curriculum sparked an increase in the number of service-learning courses offered to students as they start to enroll for the spring 2012 semester.

More than 30 of Butler’s courses offered for the spring 2012 semester have service-learning components.

The  core curriculum now includes a service-learning requirement for any sophomores, freshmen and incoming students.

Butler is on trend with other universities and colleges of similar size that have emphasized civic engagement as part of the required curriculum, according to a study by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

“Now service-learning courses are institutionally recognized as something valuable and important for students to do, and there is a deeper commitment by the university to have them continue,” said Donald Braid, director of the Center for Citizenship and Community.

The classes are a way for students to give service to their community, as well as to see how outside experience contributes to learning, Braid said.

Each course requires a minimum of 20 hours of work off campus, but some instructors may ask for more.
Sophomore Zach Baldwin, middle/secondary education major, helps students learning English as a second language at Ben Davis High School.

”It’s interesting to hear the views these students have on American society since they are from different countries,” Baldwin said. “But at times it can also be difficult to relate my experiences at the school back to my class work.”

Senior Eric Shoemaker is not required to take a service-learning course but thought it would be a different experience.

He is currently enrolled in the service-learning in Spanish course taught by Spanish instructor Liliana Torres-Goens.

A part of the experience he said he really enjoys is being able to develop a relationship with  students at George Washington High School.

“Right now I’m working with certain students, trying to build their confidence with speaking English,” Shoemaker said.

Torres-Goens said she has been teaching these courses for about three or four years and hasn’t heard anything negative. For her class, they have weekly meetings to discuss assigned readings, personal journals and papers.

“Students are very interested, and they find out more about themselves during and after the process,” Torres-Goens said.

Arthur Hochman, professor of early elementary education, teaches a course titled “Self and Service” with Bonnie Brown, associate professor of pharmacy practice.

“It’s not just about sending people out to do charity work,” Hochman said. ”There’s a reflective nature about it in which you’re learning through the work you’re doing out in the field.  Students may like it because it’s a true sense of utilizing knowledge.”

-Additional reporting by Jill McCarter

Butler University incorporates service learning—volunteer work—into several courses.

Frankly, Bulldogs should be even more involved in the community, and the university should incentivize them.

I’ve heard faculty and students complain about the confines of the Butler Bubble, of being trapped in a world unrelated to Indianapolis.

My advice? Go out and volunteer around the city.

Bulldogs should get active, and the university should encourage this by requiring volunteer work  even more classes.

It seems the university has latched onto this idea, and service learning appears to be a more frequent requirement in many classes.

“In service-learning courses, students are thinking about the work they are performing in the community, why they are doing it and how it connects to issues of diversity and social justice,” Donald Braid, director of the Center for Citizenship and Community, told The Collegian.

Normally, college students live in a very localized community where they live and learn all in a few-block radius.

Students live with strangers, listen to professors give sometimes-crazy, sometimes-crazy-boring lectures and pull all-nighters fueled by stress and energy drinks.

To me, it’s marvelous and unforgettable. At the same time, it’s easy to lose perspective.

After graduation, Bulldogs have to be a part of their community, and that means both applying what they’ve learned in college  and by helping their neighbors.

Volunteering achieves practice in both.

Butler already encourages a community perspective, one not just about making the job but about enacting change.

Bulldogs shouldn’t just hear about that from the administration.

If the university adopts a system where, for example, all students had to volunteer for a total of 80 hours a year, they’d get out into the community.

Undergraduates would help people across Indianapolis and bring to reality the liberal arts philosophy that Butler loves to publicize so much.

And there’s a practical aspect to it as well.

“It’s not just about sending people out to do charity work,” education professor Arthur Hochman told The Collegian. “There’s a reflective nature about it in which you’re learning through the work you’re doing out in the field. Students may like it because it’s a true sense of utilizing knowledge.”

Volunteering gives students ways to practice the skills they’re trained in and applications for the lectures they attend.

On top of that, they can build networks of support and even friendships with potential employers.

Butler would gain tons of positive public relations, too. There aren’t many things better than some 4,000 volunteer workers.

Students are busy. But I’m pretty sure most of us could find a few hours a week to get involved.

The university as a whole should give students a gentle push in the right direction.

Individual involvement is fantastic, but it’s not enough.

Bulldogs stand to gain a lot of real experience and personal development from this service, and the community needs the help and support.

Students sign up and get out of the Bubble.

Administrators, give us a stronger hint of motivation.

Baby-sitting small children sounds like fun for some people. I am not one of those people.

I am all for helping the world. My version of helping the world though is not making sure that all the students at a community center have their afternoon snacks and play nicely on the playground.

Through the university’s Indianapolis Community Requirement, students are required to complete a course that would “involve active engagement with the Indianapolis community,” according to the Butler University Core Curriculum website.

I’ve taken two service-learning courses during my tenure at Butler.

In one course, I was required to complete 20 hours at the Martin Luther King Community Center.

If service learning is meant to show us life outside of the Butler Bubble, why do I remember nothing even though it’s only been three short semesters since then?

Even after completing my 20 hours and writing my research paper, I felt little connection to the semester of work I had just completed.

I started to think it was solely because I was an awful person—which could be true—but then I started to realize that the point of volunteering is to get you involved in something you care about.

While I think service learning is a fine idea in concept, making students participate in something takes away from the point.

Most students, when told to complete something off campus on their own time, will start to resent the idea of going, and that really ends up taking away from what they get out of it.

By the time midterms rolled around, I was tired of going to the center because I really had other homework to do; I had other things that I could have been doing.

It’s important to give back to your community. But it’s also important to want to give back to your community.

People should do something good because they have an urgency to do—not because the university tells them to.

We’re in a position that some people never even get to see. We’re attending a private university with tuition higher than the average income of Hoosiers. We’re lucky, so it’s only fair to help out.

But that idea of doing something for a noble cause gets lost in the mix of course requirements and volunteer hour logs.