International Service Learning

Rhodes College, St. Olaf College and Southwestern University

Partners Project Report

St. Olaf, Rhodes, and Southwestern submitted a Global Partners proposal last summer and were awarded a $5,000 grant. The grant was used in three ways: 1) to fund Michael McLain's travel to the Heifer Ranch to explore possible connections between the partners and Heifer in international service-learning projects; 2) to fund the travel of McLain, Joe Favazza, and Susan Mennicke to St. Olaf for a service-learning symposium; 3) to fund the travel of Fairbanks and Angela Goehring, International Student Advisor at St. Olaf, to Honduras to explore the establishment of a service-learning program in Honduras. The rest of the report will detail the outcomes of these three initiatives.

McLain's visit to the Heifer Ranch in Arkansas established a connection between St. Olaf and Tim Wheeler, who heads up Heifer Project's Honduras national office. It also provided contacts between St. Olaf and Rex Enoch, who is Heifer's Director of Education. The connection with Wheeler proved invaluable for us while in Honduras. Tim and his wife Gloria coordinated our visits to universities and NGO's and made our stay immeasurably easier that it might have been. More importantly, they are open to a variety of arrangements with St. Olaf for providing the service component of a service-learning program. Enoch, while interested in pursuing college and university connections for Heifer, reports that such connections are difficult in most Heifer national projects, given their traditional emphasis on short-term volunteer efforts. The St. Olaf service-learning model has been to provide students with a relatively lengthy (five months) immersion-type experience. It would appear that, with the exception of a few countries, including Honduras, this kind of program does not fit well with Heifer's approach. However, Enoch is open to forging links in two or three countries where Heifer is situated as they are in Honduras.

McLain, Favazza, and Mennicke braved a Minnesota blizzard to come to Northfield March 14-16. They made a presentation on their programs in Honduras and Jamaica to students, faculty, and administrators from both St. Olaf and Carleton. The presentation was spirited, marked by some dissent from yours truly, and very well received. What emerged, at least for this writer, was that St. Olaf's approach, initiated in an era before the significant recent push for service-learning represents a very different way to deliver service-learning programs. We have tended to provide programs that are long on individual initiative and short on direct curricular ties. It is in the latter respect that we now fly in the face of the consensus of writers in the field. St. Olaf is developing the now more conventional service-learning programs which are driven by the pedagogical goals of individual courses or programs, but, I think it is fair to say, the symposium participants agreed that there is still a need, for a small number of students, for the older St. Olaf approach. The difficulty in launching new programs of this kind consists in bucking the assumption that every program must have a departmental or programmatic home. The symposium helped me better understand the landscape of service-learning, but also reconfirmed my commitment to protect a space for the more individually focused style of service-learning.

Goehring and myself visited Honduras from May 16 to May 23. We spent the first two days of our visit with the students then in Honduras for the Rhodes May term. Although the period was brief, it did allow me to compare my impressions of our kind of program to the now more conventional kind of service-learning. The working part of our visited consisted in making contacts with four universities -- Catholic University of Honduras, Jose Cecilio del Valle University, Technological University of Honduras, and Zamarano University -- and two NGO's -- FINCA, a community banking organization that specializes in loans to poor rural women, and Heiffer Project. Since our study-service programs have traditionally been student-created, university-based programs that included a credit-bearing service component, we were attempting to forge both educational and service links. All four universities and the two NGO's were enthusiastic in responding to our inquiries about partnerships. We could work easily with either NGO, and both would provide fantastic opportunities for our students. The rub comes, as expected, in the mismatch between American liberal arts colleges and more typical international universities. It will be difficult to find curricular matches between St. Olaf and a technological university or an agricultural university (Zamarano), but not beyond possibility. At this point, in my judgement, a partnership with Zamarano is the most promising. The work still to be done on this campus is to create interest and support for such a program with relevant faculty in the Hispanic Studies program. That will wait until this fall when faculty return in force.

In my judgement the grant allowed us to take some significant steps toward expanding service-learning at St. Olaf. It also made clear to us the ways we are alike and different from other institutions with respect to service learning. The collaboration with McLain, Favazza, and Mennicke was invaluable in the investigation of Honduras as a service-learning site. Building on our symposium last March, we have submitted a proposal for the annual AAC&U conference for a panel presentation on international service-learning and the idea of world citizenship. That panel, should the proposal be accepted, will focus on what is distinctive about service-learning programs on our campuses and how those distinctive features contribute to the widely urged goal of promoting global or world citizenship. Some version of this panel will likely prove most beneficial to other Global Partners institutions, and I would be happy to produce a printed version of the panel for those institutions. Partner institutions could also benefit from the connections we have jointly established in Honduras, should any of those institutions be interested in programs in Honduras. I think I can speak for the four of us in saying that the collaboration has been fruitful and enjoyable. We have more work to do before we can harvest the fruits; at least on this campus, but the Global Partners grant helped us take a significant step forward.

A report of grant expenses will be sent together with this discursive report. The financial report will be in two formats: 1) produced from our campus-based Lawson accounting program, and 2) an Excel spreadsheet detailing expenses by category and individuals. The first format is included since only documented expenses are included in the Lawson reports.

Report by Rick Fairbanks for Rick Fairbanks, Joe Favazza, Michael McLain, and Susan Mennicke, July 22, 2002

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