News Archive

Like all good relationships, where both partners benefit, Service Learning can be complicated, difficult and challenging.

It can also be satisfying, rewarding, even life-changing.

Service Learning is a component of New Courses that still has a long way to go before it is embedded in the University's curriculum and traditions.

But great work is being done in Medicine, Engineering, the Arts and through the Guild to ensure it is an important part of the future at UWA.

Alec Cameron , the new Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), says it is "the University's responsibility to produce good citizens from the best and brightest young high school graduates."

Professor Cameron said Service Learning was consistent with the principles of New Courses, which aimed at developing the whole student.

"We get the best students here, who will go forward to leading roles. Service Learning is one way of helping them to develop as good leaders," he said.

Donella Caspersz , lecturer in Management  and Organisations in the Business School, and her colleague Doina Olaru have a UWA Teaching Fellowship to look at Service Learning, to define it ("which is quite difficult") and to understand its value.

"We are both engaged in the global movement, Students In Free Enterprise (which has recently been rebadged as ENACTUS), which is similar to Service Learning, but is completely voluntary and carries no credit points," Dr Caspersz said.

"Our students have achieved amazing success working with communities, while adding to their skills and experience, but we need a more uniform approach to Service Learning as a whole."

They are developing a unit which will provide the foundations of Service Learning, to prepare students for working in the community.

"Most units in the Business School have a practical element, so most have the potential to become Service Learning units. But students still need to learn about civic and social responsibility and acquire the skills for research and applying that research to needs in the community," Dr Caspersz said.

"It is a big ask for academics because a Service Learning unit takes a lot of time, a lot of involvement. But we are keen that it be seen as legitimate activity for academics.  There isn't the depth of scholarship related to Service Learning in Australia as there is in North America, but roll on another five years, and I am sure it will be a field of study that is more widely recognised here."

Denese Playford , Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, has seen the idea of Service Learning form the basis of the Rural Clinical School, with which she has been involved for several years.

"The Rural Clinical School is responding to rural communities' need for doctors. The students learn clinical skills through community engagement. These are exactly the aims of Service Learning," she said.

"With the same kind of aim, the Faculty is developing four Service Learning units for a special Scholarly Activity stream in the Doctor of Medicine, the University's new graduate medical degree, that starts in 2014..

"Medicine has a long tradition of altruism and Service Learning is picking up on that and formalising it."

A/Professor Playford said she had had great support from the service sector, including the WA Council of Social Services, in creating the new units.

"The courses will prepare the students for going out into the community: they will apply learning about the burden of disease, find out how to manage community-based relationships, gain project management skills, understand equity issues, and develop new perceptions about their ability to be local/global citizens."

She said the community projects would not be prescribed. "The students will be academically prepared to listen to people in the community and their representatives and then work out how they can use their skills to do what is needed to solve a problem.  Colleagues with community contacts that would benefit from students' work are welcome to be in touch."

Volunteering among students is strong, especially since many of them come to university with high school experience of community service. Aden Date co-ordinates volunteering at the Guild.

"While it's not the same as Service Learning, a lot of students already have the right attitude and enthusiasm so I'm trying to get the faculties involved with us so we can create some skilled volunteering that will one day become Service Learning units," he said. "The faculty societies know what students can do and we know what's needed in the community."

In the Arts Faculty, Chantal Bourgault du Coudray has been co-ordinating the Arts Practicum unit for several years.

"Workplace learning and career development is especially important for Arts students who don't have the same clearly-defined workplace directions as, say, engineers," she said.

"We have had a lot of success with the program, but it's about employability. Service Learning is less about employability and more about community engagement.

"It needs to be mutually beneficial, not simply charity work or taking what you need without considering the partner. The students need to learn something; the community needs to gain something."

Assistant Professor Bourgault du Coudray agreed with Dr Caspersz that it took a long time and hard work to build relationships.

"Funding is another consideration," she said. "There are opportunities in the wheatbelt towns and up north in the mining towns for students and communities to work together. But some of the most meaningful opportunities for Service Learning are a long and expensive way away."

In the faculty of Engineering Computing and Mathematics, Winthrop Professor Caroline Baillie has been involved in Service Learning for many years, chiefly through her Waste for Life Project in South America and Lesotho.  She has involved hundreds of students from around the world in this not-for-profit NGO which helps poverty-stricken people to make a living out of recycling waste products and creating something useful.

"But what I do doesn't quite fit the UWA model of Service Learning because usually my students will serve a community without actually engaging with them. I find it's often better not to have direct interaction, before students have questioned the impact that such interventions can have on communities," Professor Baillie said.

"They can still learn about the community, come up with engineering solutions to help them, and pick up valuable skills along the way."

With Assistant Professor Rita Armstrong , she is running a compulsory unit for all Engineering and Science majors, Engineering Challenges in the Globalised World.

"It is also a broadening unit, and we have students from disciplines such as design and music who are taking it," said Professor Armstrong, who is an anthropologist.

Her background means she and Professor Baillie approach Service Learning a little differently.

"The students in the Engineers Without Borders program are not told ‘design this'," Professor Baillie said. "They are given an open challenge and it helps them to learn about social context.  There are different kinds of communities and cultural groups and the students must do a lot of exploration around social context."

Professor Armstrong has set up a partnership with the Shire of Roebourne, which has a waste problem with the huge unwanted tyres from mining trucks. "They have asked what the students can do with rubber crumb," she said. "But it's not just an engineering solution they are looking for.  The students have to take into account the Indigenous lifestyle of the people in Roebourne.  The way the products are made must fit with that."