Once a week, Trinity senior Sarah Gonzales travels nearly an hour north of Durham to visit the small home of an extended family of Hispanic migrant farm workers, where she tutors the household's three daughters.
By working through a Berenstein Bears book with the 16-year-old daughter, Gonzales is doing an optional assignment for a Spanish literature class through the student-run program called Learning through Experience, Action, Partnership and Service.
LEAPS facilitates service learning, which is the combination of student learning, community involvement and organized reflections. The structure of these reflections varies by teacher but always includes discussions facilitated by members of LEAPS. Service learning differs from ordinary community service because of the academic component.
The organization that began three years ago as the brainchild of Glenn Gutterman, Trinity '98, and Dan Kessler, Trinity '98, has evolved far beyond its modest beginnings.
"LEAPS started out with five people sitting around the Phi Psi commons room, and [Gutterman] would bring his grandma's homemade banana bread," said co-coordinator Trinity senior Evan Mandel. "That's why I joined."
In three years, LEAPS has grown from five to 30 members and now facilitates service in 10 classes. In fact, LEAPS has become so popular that the number of interested teachers may soon surpass their number of facilitators.
"It's just been phenomenal growth," said Trinity senior Tara Kumar, LEAPS co-coordinator. "[But] we're not going to take on classes unless we produce a quality product. The bottom line is that we want to produce quality LEAPS components in the classes that we do. "
The solution may lie in institutionalization. In order to show the University's commitment to service learning, William Chafe, dean of Trinity College and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, created a University committee last year to deal specifically with issues of service learning.
In the spring, the committee authorized grants for teachers who wanted to develop service learning components in their classes. Committee chair Betsy Alden works out of the Kenan Ethics Program as a full-time coordinator of service learning.
Alden, who pioneered a national model of service learning in the early 1980s, sees definite hands-on University involvement in the future to accommodate professors which LEAPS cannot handle.
"LEAPS, no matter how many students become involved, will not be able to handle all the placements and reflection required," Alden said. "As more faculty get involved, we'll need a go-between office, which is one of our major challenges."
The service learning committee is deliberating on exactly how it will institutionalize service learning. For example, if the University decides to follow a LEAPS-type model, it will need to provide facilitators. But it has other options.
"LEAPS' reflection process is only one example," Mandel said. "There are several processes which are equally meaningful. The point is to make sure that students are thinking."
Instead of reflection sessions, the University could require more writing assignments, thus cutting down on the number of personnel. This model is similar to one used by associate professor of political science Sheridan Johns, who has incorporated community service into his Food and Hunger class since 1980.
Service learning is also a component of the proposed curriculum reform. The current curriculum proposal includes an ethical inquiry requirement; because a service learning class is one way to fulfill that requirement, professors would be encouraged to offer such classes.
The curriculum committee briefly discussed making service learning mandatory but decided against it. "Personally, I think the emergence of service learning over the last few years has been a very important development," said Peter Lange, committee chair and professor of political science. "But nobody felt that service learning should be a requirement. It's contradictory to require service learning. It's an oxymoron."
But LEAPS members are concerned that the University could assume too much authority over the process. Members agree that service learning should become institutionalized in order to accommodate all interested professors, but they are wary of losing student control. For LEAPS, a strong student base is crucial to achieving its ultimate goal of student activism.
"Although we at LEAPS spend a lot of time on process and developing community partnerships, we also see student activism in issues as the end result," Mandel said. "Student-led and student-initiated service is essential if the endpoint is going to remain student activism."
Although the University is supporting service learning through various channels, there are some criticisms and complaints. Mandel explained that some students believe that service learning makes community service selfish, because they are getting academic credit for their good deeds. But those students, he said, that don't understand the give-and-take aspect.
"The concept of community service where you're sitting on a pedestal and throwing pennies to those who need it-that's insulting to me," Mandel said. "The purpose is to create a partnership. There's no hierarchy. You're learning from each other."
Alden said another criticism is that service learning is not academicly rigorous. She contends that effective learning can take place outside of the classroom, and that the reflection component-usually including papers or journal entries-fulfills the traditional academic role.
Trinity sophomore Dania Ermentrout agrees; working with migrant worker families for her Spanish literature class has taught her things she couldn't learn otherwise. "We don't get much speaking exposure in class," she explained. "Speaking to the little kids you don't worry about messing up-you can concentrate on understanding instead. It's hard to see immediate results but you have confidence that what you're doing will help them in the future."
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