« you're a parrot | Main | progress on building a Boston civic network »
October 15, 2009
what makes high quality service?
(Washington, DC). I am here for the annual grantees' meeting of Learn & Serve America, the federal program that funds community service as part of education ("service-learning"). In my own Tufts class last week, funded by L&SA, I asked my students to read the "Starfish Story," which is very widely used to motivate service. (I have previously satirized the story, here).
Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance he could see a person going back and forth between the surf's edge and and the beach. Back and forth this person went. As the man approached he could see that there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.
The man was stuck by the the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.
As he came up to the person he said, "You must be crazy. There are thousands of miles of beach covered with starfish. You can't possibly make a difference." The person looked at the man. He then stooped down and pick up one more starfish and threw it back into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said, "It sure made a difference to that one!"
I asked my class to compare the Starfish Story to some principles that have adopted by our Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts. We say:
- The College ... strives to operate its community partnership activities in accordance with the following principles:
- To focus its programs in communities where Tufts University campuses are located: Boston's Chinatown, Medford, Somerville, Grafton, the Mystic River Watershed and Talloires, France.
- To plan, conduct, and manage teaching, service and research activities in full collaboration with community partners. To take into consideration the impressive assets of local communities as well as the problems and challenges that they face.
- To fully orient and prepare people from Tufts to be effective in their community work. To elevate the knowledge of community representatives about Tufts. To maximize both (a) contributions to the education of Tufts students and to faculty research, and (b) benefits to communities.
- To support university and community representatives to jointly define high standards of quality, and to produce work that meets these standards. To document, evaluate and disseminate information about both educational outcomes and community benefits.
- To support and elevate faculty participation in community partnerships through their teaching, research and public service activities.
Some of the differences that my students identified ...
The guy in the Starfish story doesn't "plan." He doesn't appear to work in a community where he has roots or can be held accountable to the recipients of his service as fellow citizens. He doesn't collaborate with the starfish. He doesn't have standards of quality, certainly not ones that the starfish have helped to develop. There is no connection to research to learning. If the man in the story benefits from his actions, he is not conscious of the benefit.
October 15, 2009 5:15 PM | category: none