Music Informance as Embodied Service Learning

Educational Foundations, Spring 2004 by Doyle, Mary Ann, Hotchkiss, Gwen, Noel, Marie, Huss, Ann, Holmes, Rebecca

A service-learning component of the foundation class requires students to contribute in any number of ways to schools or community centers in the greater New Orleans area. Students demonstrate a remarkable commitment to service-learning and provide evidence of their involvement in a variety of ways. Many describe the benefits of their experience in terms of how much they learned from it. Students from urban K-12 experiences learn about suburban, private, and independent schools just as students from those backgrounds learn about well and poorly resourced urban schools. They learn about themselves and one another too, as well as about this region and its very diverse cultures.

The foundation class provides an educational focus to what students describe in their admissions documents as a call to service (Coles 1996). At the start of the fall 1998 semester however, students were encouraged to consider spending at least some of their ten service hours in the school where the fifth grade teacher had asked for our support. Students in the class that fall and those enrolled over the following three semesters accepted the invitation and participated by observing, reading, tutoring, assisting the teacher, volunteering in the after-school program and working with parents and students in an after-school computer lab.

Over the next three semesters, evidence of our cooperative relationship increased. A student teacher completed his practicum in the fifth grade class with the teacher who had first requested our support. The professional development coordinator of the school, Marie Noel, organized a system of matching university students with B. Pearl teachers who shared similar interests or needs. The education coordinator for the Amistad Research Center, Nikki Wilson, who was an alumnus of an undergraduate English and a graduate education program, designed and implemented an Afro-Caribbean Dance curriculum in eight area schools. She included B. Pearl in her selection and employed foundation students in her work. Student evaluations at the end of each semester enthusiastically advocated a continuation of the cooperation between the university and the school, with some suggestions for greater structure and other suggestions for providing less structure.

Spring 2000

During the spring semester of 2000, the university publicly renewed its commitment to service learning and to those practices that develop learning communities within the university (Zlotkowski 2000; Checkoway 2000). In the College of Arts and Sciences, learning community courses and student cohorts were established for several disciplines. The education foundation course was not reconfigured as an official learning community course, but it met the criteria the university was employing for these newly envisioned courses. Since there were no elective courses in the preservice teacher programs, students often found themselves enrolled with the same peers from course to course within the program sequence. Service learning components provided opportunities for students to engage in the community beyond the classroom, and share their reflections with one another within the context of particular courses. However, there was one way in which the education foundation class brought together several different preservice teacher cohorts.