Community Service Learning in Honors Education

In the late 1990s when the state legislature decided to create an honors college within public higher education, and the state Board of Higher Education chose the University of Massachusetts Amherst as the site for this new venture, the founders of Commonwealth College decided to make Community Service Learning (CSL) a core value of this new honors college.  CSL is NOT a requirement, but the aim was to create many opportunities to engage in CSL as students progress through their honors curriculum, so students would be invited over and over to expand their learning through community engagement.

Embedding CSL in honors education makes sense for many reasons.  Here are two:

The hallmark of honors education at UMass is active learning.  A teacher may be a brilliant lecturer, but if his or her course consists entirely of lectures, by definition it is not an honors class.  Honors classes must be designed to engage students actively in constructing their own learning.  There are many ways to reach this goal—conducting research and making presentations, producing artistic creations, engaging in dialogue, etc.—and one of the most powerful ways is to engage in sustained action for the public good and, at the same time, to engage in systematic reflection on one’s experience.  In good service-learning, students forge connections between theory and experience:  concepts from the course inform and guide action, while experience illuminates the concepts.

As a land-grant university, UMass has the mission of using knowledge to serve the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Community Service Learning is one of the ways that UMass fulfills this mission.  In the short run, students provide real service to the communities around UMass.  But more importantly, in the longer run, through CSL students develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that prepare them for responsible and effective citizenship.  Students who choose honors education are bright, capable, hard-working.  Through service-learning, Commonwealth College is preparing future leaders who have direct experience with social problems and an informed sense of social responsibility—leaders who will help to build communities we all want to live in.

Community Service Learning is one of the ways that Commonwealth College serves the entire UMass campus:  it supports the Office of Community Service Learning both for its own students and for all students—graduate as well as undergraduate—who wish to deepen their learning by connecting it with community service.