Service-Learning for the History Student

Anna Lindner

November 18, 2015

The Relevance of History in Service-Learning

This semester, I am taking Spanish Capstone and four history classes. It’s a good thing I’m a history major, because that’s a lot of history, and it’s sometimes overwhelming. I will admit, I tend to be a person stuck in the past. Rather than the future, I think about how the past has impacted our current realities. For me, history isn’t some abstract discipline. It’s strikingly relevant to my life, and every day in class, I get to connect historical events to our world today, which I find inspiring. As an ABSL coordinator, I engage with the academic aspect of service-learning. I try to have an interdisciplinary approach to my job and my academics, which, of course, means relating service-learning to history. I have been the liaison for African history this past semester, so I wrote the following description of service-learning as it pertains to history.

Service-Learning in the History Department:

The history department, by virtue of its nature, could and, I believe, should have a close relationship with the Service-Learning Center. History is not merely the study of the past; it is also an investigation of humans, the way they perceive and then try to interpret the world around them. In order to learn about history, we as students engage with readings, listen to lectures, and write papers. I personally find these processes to be, when I’m not too stressed out, life-giving.

But is there a way to render the study of people in their cultural contexts more fully, more creatively, more humanly? Perhaps we can learn not only from written texts, but active, living texts as well. Meeting people in both our local and global communities could connect the knowledge saturating our heads with what is currently happening in the world.

I study history because I care about classism, racism, and sexism; I care about justice because I study history. For me, the two are inextricably intertwined: interdisciplinary, and mutually giving. Studying history reminds me of the world surrounding me, but engaging in the surrounding world reminds me why I care about history. The problems of classism, racism, and sexism are not some abstract topics detailed in thick books and locked away in a vault of dusty tomes. No; they actively shape the world in which I live. They intimately affect my neighborhood, my classmates; they affect me.

Service-learning has been essential in my growth as a student and as a person. It allows me to step out of myself, to (literally) step out of the world that has been carved out for me, simply by virtue of my wealth, privilege, and caring family. During those ventures out of comfort, I’m forcibly reminded that this is the real world, full of pain, sorrow, and desperation. But at the same time, there exists remarkable wisdom, hope, and amazing resilience. As I get older, I hope to learn more deeply and fully how to service-learn not to assert my own superiority, but affirm the worth of others. If at all possible, we struggle to put ourselves out there purely because we have discovered invaluable lessons to be learned from those whom we originally assumed we were trying to serve. After many awkward and even painful interactions during service-learning, I receive something invaluable: not the feeling that I helped someone, but that I connected to someone as a fellow human, and thereby gain a genuine friendship and the wisdom they share with me.

For me, Service-Learning has become merely code for another idea: human connection. We purposefully enter an uncomfortable space and inadvertently learn way too much about ourselves. As history students, we are privy to the wisdom of centuries of philosophers, theologians, rulers, scholars, and revolutionaries. But it’s not only the greats who make history. It’s also the common people who contributed to the history we have today. And so we, as common people privileged with the opportunity to learn, should crave the opportunity to connect with other common people who may just one day form the history that future history students will one day study. 

A Christian Student at a Secular University: Who Is My Neighbo[u]r?

This entry serves three purposes: 1) A break from reading some arcane 18C court judgments, 2) an opportunity to process the question on my mind since day one of my being at a major state university (note: ambiguity is necessary to avoid defamation lawsuits), and 3) an excuse to blog since I last blogged as a staff.

So what does it mean to be a Christian at a secular university? I have to get used to the idea that my worldview is the (lone) minority position. I suspect my experience might be very similar to those before me—especially those who are experiencing/have experienced the transition from Calvin to a state university. The only Christian voice, however, need not be silent. I just have to learn how to present myself in a language that the others understand. That’s not too bad. Sunday—according to my peers—isn’t a day of rest spent in worship. Sundays are used to recover from hangovers.

The Cupps mug equivalent over here is a booze mug. Granted it might be a cultural thing, yet many drinkers can’t hold their own. End result: missed lectures, and desperate visits to the doctors for screening, counseling, and scheduling medical procedures. If only condoms came with gospel tracks, or cars could detect alcohol. Not that such cases do not happen at Calvin, but it’s definitely fewer.

When I first set foot in a beautiful, prominent church one Sunday morning, I was surprised that there weren’t any more than 30 in attendance. Choose any two members of that church and their combined age would be greater than 120. Where are the younger people, I asked myself. Maybe I was at the wrong church. No, they are still in bed.

Calvin is truly a unique environment. I find myself in many conversations where I could talk about my faith, even challenge it.  It’s also somewhere where I hear people ask themselves such hard questions like “what’s my purpose in life?” and “why do good people suffer?” Calvin is a place where one’s intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions dovetail to receive some real prime-time attention for some imminent center stage action.

This morning in the bathroom, the janitor came in to collect the trash. I acknowledged his presence but he only came in to do his stuff. I thanked him for his work as he made his way out; he didn’t even make a sound. He came back in a few minutes later, “It was nice of you to say ‘thank you’.” That moment—a moment where the two-dimensional reading from a senior’s capstone seminar became alive in the very world that we have being wanting to reform and serve—made me realize that my neighbors are those whom I cross paths with. It’s that missing “u” in my “neighborhood.” Everyone is my neighbor. Ah, it’s so easy to associate with and stay close to those who share my worldview. Such brief moments, like the one with the janitor, might never come again, and any one of those moments might just be my last chance to love that neighbor.  

Why College? What is Service-Learning?

While Transitions, the orientation program, winds down, I thought it might be good to record some of my remarks from this morning's introduction service-learning and the Service-Learning Center for new students. I tried something new with this approach.

First, what is college for? Why would new students choose Calvin out of the many thousands of available college and university options? And then what is Calvin here for?

My contention, after 25 years of pondering these questions, is that it has something to do with learning to think, to love, and to do. And in so saying, I am defying conventional wisdom, which argues that college is to get people ready for work and citizenship. I say ok, but more. This college finds itself in a tradition that yearns for transformation - for that which is not, to be made right again. And it tries to prepare people to contribute to that "making right" by helping them to think about what they know, what they love, and what they should and can do. Calvin College has a vision for transformation.

Next I suggested that the path from that which is not right, to a transformed reality, one in which things are as they should be, includes three preparatory tracks, all necessary. Around here we often refer to them often in terms like knowledge, skills, and virtues. Our core curriculum is set up around these three core goals, and this is one of the things that sets Calvin apart.

To understand service-learning at Calvin, a little history helps. In 1964, just a few months after a young idealistic president was assassinated in Dallas, two young undergraduates at Calvin, with help from a key professor and a key administrator, formed a new student program called KIDS, Kindling Intellectual Desire in Students, a program aimed at providing tutoring support for children in Grand Rapids' core city schools, while also providing opportunities for Calvin students to experience life outside the often too-protective bubble that makes up college life. The program thrived, and soon became the largest and most successful student organization around the college, and by the 1980s had expanded widely into multiple areas of service-providing, including an emergency moving services, construction and technical support for homeowners, spring break service trips, poverty awareness retreats, big-brother, big-sister mentoring relationships and much more. In the early 1990s, the academic division joined the movement, and soon had incorporated dozens of course assignments designed to actively teach through the pedagogy of service-learning, in partnership with some of the by-now hundreds of local community partners. Which brings us to the present day efforts. We offer multiple opportunities for Calvin students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends to participate in thoughtful, reflective, creative service activity that fits into the reciprocal dynamic suggested by our motto - "Serving to Learn- Learning to Serve."

And to what end? Not simply a detached, triumphalistic, save-the-world end that fulfills a Christian duty but ignores our call to Biblical justice and relationship. But to the ends of a true Christian liberal arts education - Knowledge and learning, Skills and active doing, and Virtue and love. The end of our service-learning is God's shalom, when that which is not, is made right again, and things are as they once were and should be again.

Summer Reading Two: Place and Particularity

Just for a little context, this reading “Theorizing Liberal Arts Education and Place” comes from Strengthening Liberal Arts Education by Embracing Place and Particularity which was the written product of the Embrace our Place interdisciplinary study that various Calvin Faculty and Staff participated in.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this article. I believe that it speaks eloquently to what the goals of Christian Higher Education should be. It also speaks to our particular goals here at the Service-Learning Center. Early on in the article it says, “When the specific place sees higher education as a resource for the big questions being faced, dynamic opportunities develop.” I personally see a strong connection here to Service-Learning, and hope that the opportunities that we are fostering and cultivating do maximize these opportunities for both the sake of student s and the sake of the community (which really cannot be separated).

Before I go on, this quote seems to highlight only the benefit the “specific place” receives from this interaction, thus leaving out the benefit those in higher education receive. Although this quote may seem to do this, I believe in practice it does not. This being said, this particular quote points to the necessity of “the specific place see(ing) higher education as a resource.” In this it is clear that the community needs to view higher education as a resource before the relationship can develop. Our question needs to be how can we better aid the “specific place” in seeing higher education this way.

Lastly, this reading begins with talk about higher education and its propensity to create individuals “who are unable to care for real people in real places.” I think that this is an incredibly true insight and is often a discussion that is ignored in academia. At the same time it this article emphasizes the importance of Place and the obligation Higher Education has to instilling a sense of responsibility into students. Much emphasis is placed on this discussion of the importance of Place as a new topic of conversation in Higher Education. Do we see this as a new conversation in greater society or just in Higher Education? Has this conversation been taking place, just using different language? Is it possible that even our discussion of Place is an example of the inability those in academia have to relate to those outside of that particular community?

Becca Timmermans

Will Calvin College live up to its Christian commitment to take care of God's creation?

This image was taken from the cover of Grand Rapids Magazine, wherein a feature story details how West Michigan, and particularly Grand Rapids has displayed an extraordinary commitment to environmental sustainability. From Mayor George Heartwell's efforts to purchase 100% renewable energy for all government buildings in Grand Rapids to Guy Bazzani of Bazzani Associates designing some of the most innovative environmentally sustainable buildings in the country to the new Metropolitan Health Hospital integrating key environmentally sound technologies into its operations and building to the outstanding example of local companies like Herman Miller that are working to eliminate all waste from their operations by 2020; Grand Rapids, and Western Michigan, generally, is doing some amazing work to improve our impact on this world and manage natural and limited resources more effectively.

But while the Grand Rapids community continues to display forward thinking and progress with regards to an improved commitment to environmental sustainability, I do not see the same commitment being displayed here at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. It is true that in 2004 the college completed the Vincent and Helen Bunker Interpretive Center that makes use of cutting edge technologies to showcase environmentally sustainable practice. Indeed, the college should be applauded for construction of this building. However, since the completion of this building, Calvin College's commitment to the environment has been less clear, in fact, there are signs of regression in its commitment to the environment.

Take a quick walking tour of the campus, and you will be astonished by the amount of new construction taking place. In the past year the foundations and framework for the new Spoelhof Fieldhouse Complex have been completed, as well as a completely new extension to the existing dorm of Kalsbeek-Huizenga. Additionally, plans are in place to completely renovate the interior of the Fine Arts Center as well as construct an entirely new building that will serve as Student Commons. In short, Calvin College is undergoing massive building projects as it continues to grow and change. But does Calvin display the same commitment in these building projects as it did in the construction of the Bunker Interpretive Center?

The answer to that question is not nearly so clear. While the Bunker Interpretive center is a LEED certified building, exemplifying some of the highest standards in the building industry for environmental sustainability, the new buildings are not forecasted to be LEED certified. Surveying the web pages revealing news, progress, pictures, and statements about the new buildings, there is little hint of any substantial commitment to environmental sustainability (http://www.calvin.edu/campaign/priorities/fieldhouse/). Certainly one hopeful sign is that one floor within the new dorm wing will be reserved for students passionate about environmental stewardship. My growing fear, though, is that Calvin College does not exercise a consistent ethic of environmental care. Instead, administration adopts a utilitarian analysis wherein an emphasis on environmental care is only warranted when it will help the bottom line, which more often than not seems to be about the economics. Undoubtedly, the new buildings will be great for glossy publications that the college sends out to attract prospective students, but in the meantime, are we taking care of the natural environment that our campus exists within and affects?

If the administration fails to exhibit as equally strong of an environmental commitment to new buildings and building renovations as they did with the Bunker Interpretive center, they threaten to reduce the Bunker Interpretive Center to a mere token effort instead of a monument representing the beginning of something truly transformational and powerful happening here on Calvin College's campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So while, as the Grand Rapids Magazine article highlights, West Michigan, and especially Grand Rapids, is showing strong signs of "going green," Calvin has yet to prove itself in such respect. Moreover, for Calvin College, in particular, the stakes are not merely whether they will join a national awakening to environmental stewardship or not, but rather, will they live up to their asserted claims of a Christian commitment to stewardship of creation and daily efforts to bring about Shalom, that future day when all of humanity, God, and nature will exist in right relationship with one another.