Suzanne Loker, professor of textiles and apparel, gives a paper during the service-learning symposium Jan. 21 on the partnership in learning between Cornell apparel and textile management students and the staff of the Da' Spot clothing store on the Ithaca Commons. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography
A mural project involving the entire community in a Dominican village; a design for housing where homeless families can stay until they get back on their feet; a plan to record the collective history of a small upstate New York hamlet before its oldest residents die -- these projects and others have two things in common. They were developed by Cornell faculty as a way of including a "service" component in their courses, and they all received a Cornell Faculty Fellows in Service grant in 1998-99.
The grants were awarded by a committee composed of faculty from seven Cornell colleges and administered by Faculty Fellows in Service (FFIS), which is a program of Cornell's Public Service Center in Barnes Hall. Last year the program dispersed $30,000 in grants, ranging from $500 to $2,000, to 15 service-learning projects in nearly every school and college on campus. In the third annual Symposium on Service Learning Jan. 21, faculty members who proposed and managed six of the projects reported on their success, delivering specially commissioned papers. Their collective message? Service -- the act of helping others in one's community -- can be as powerful a learning tool as textbook study.
"Cornell has a strong tradition of service as an essential component of education," said Leonardo Vargas-Méndez, interim director of Cornell's Public Service Center and past coordinator of the FFIS. "It is absolutely part of Cornell's mission. The word 'service' is linked to learning in the university's mission statement."
FFIS is a network of about 100 faculty on campus who involve their students in service-learning projects, said Vargas-Méndez. Thirty-six Cornell courses have used service learning as a teaching strategy to enhance classroom learning, mobilizing as many as 1,000 students a year. "That makes us one of the largest networks in the nation in terms of numbers of faculty and students involved," he said.
A key aspect of service learning, said Vargas Méndez, is "connecting the students with the community, going outside the ivory tower walls." While most projects take place in greater Ithaca and Tompkins County, service can extend to places as far away as Mexico, India and the Dominican Republic.
Thanks to an FFIS grant and other help from Cornell, the remote Dominican village El Limón has two striking community-made murals and the town's first Internet connection and web site. The web site was built to communicate across continents about the mural project. A radio linkup provides the Internet connection -- telephone lines do not reach the town.
The town generated its own electricity for the first time in 1999, making it possible to plug in a computer, thanks to assistance from Jon Katz, eco-partners coordinator at Cornell's Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy, and Jim Barsch, an associate professor in agricultural and biological engineering, earlier FFIS grant recipients. The murals came about when residents, inspired by a visit from Santo Domingo artists during an art festival, told Katz they wanted to depict the life of their village in a visual and public way for all to see. Katz consulted Stan Taft, associate professor of art, who turned the project into an independent study course.
"Creating public art can be an empowering experience," said Taft, whose students visited the town during the 1999 spring break to help El Limón residents plan and design the murals. They began with discussions in which townspeople described their sense of communal identity and their hopes for the future.
"We did a lot of sketches beforehand, but [the villagers'] drawings were so fresh and colorful, ultimately we decide it was inappropriate to go in and reinterpret them," said Margot Ecke '99. She said that the villagers preferred literal renderings of the things that were most important to them, such as organic farming projects and the new hydroelectric plant, rather than the students' initial renderings of iconic images.
One mural that resulted, a pictorial map of the village on an exterior wall of the town's one store, was created by El Limón residents with assistance from the Cornell students. A second mural on the town's school, showing both the village and the landscape and road that lead to it, was created with assistance from Santo Domingo art students. In addition to Ecke, the College of Architecture, Art and Planning students who went to El Limón were Anna Plesset, Macksie Vinson and Nicole Ziomek, all from the Class of '99, and senior Erika Tapp. The project was co-sponsored by a Cornell Council on the Arts grant. Pictures of the creation process and the murals themselves are accessible on the web at http://www.sas.cornell.edu/cresp/ecopartners.
Other service-learning projects presented at the symposium, and to be published by FFIS as papers, include:
Faculty Fellows in Service welcomes new service-learning proposals from Cornell faculty across campus. "The whole agenda is to make faculty see service learning as a meaningful strategy for learning and teaching," said Vargas-Méndez. FFIS grants are supported by the Office of Student and Academic Services. Grant applications for future service-learning courses and projects may be made to Faculty Fellows in Service, Public Service Center, 200 Barnes Hall. For more information contact Therese O'Connor, FFIS chair, 255-8388, or Vargas-Méndez, 255-0674, ljv1@cornell.edu, or visit the center's web site: http://www.psc.cornell.edu.
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