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    • A Community Based Learning Class Visit with Nora Reynolds

    Posted by on November 22, 2013

    “Education for Liberation: Here and Abroad” at Temple University

    By Liz Shriver and Nora Reynolds

    I visited Nora Reynolds’s course, “Education for Liberation: Here and Abroad,” to catch up on her most recent endeavor establishing Community Based Learning (CBL, another name for Service-Learning) at Temple University. Nora, who previously taught a CBL course called “Education in the Global City,” now incorporates an optional CBL component in Education for Liberation.

    On his own, Dakarai Campbell, a Temple sophomore and site coordinator for the Ben Franklin AVID tutoring program (which I manage), recruited a classmate for his AVID team from this course. I wanted to know more about how Nora was able to build a CBL component from scratch given that Education for Liberation was not originally designated as a CBL course.

    I met Nora in her first year as a PhD student in Urban Education as one of three professors of the “Education in the Global City” course at Temple University. CBL classes can be challenging to implement. Students have competing priorities: jobs, leadership positions and family responsibilities. Supplemental service as part of a course can become yet another obligation on an already full plate. They also require the management of community partners. I, along with several other community partners, recruit service-learning participants from this course.

    However, from the first semester, Nora established a high level of rigor and accountability in her classes. She also established concrete partnerships with community organizations, including the AVID tutoring program. After a year teaching this course, Nora went on to pursue participatory field research with Water for Wasala in Wasala, Nicaragua, where she currently serves as the Vice President.

    Nora is a service-learning teacher at heart. With her course, “Education for Liberation: Here and Abroad,” she sees a unique opportunity to provide students with a comparative perspective through work in the community. She could not require a community based placement as part of the class, so she has offered her students a choice: complete an extensive research paper or complete at least ten hours of service in the community and reflect on the experience.

    The day I visited, class discussion focused on dissecting the article, “To Hell With Good Intentions” by Ivan Illich (1968). Students posed the question, once you know how much harm you can do in the world even with the best intentions, how do you manage your assumptions and expectations? How do you know which programs have an impact you can support and which are exploiting both volunteers and local participants? A tense discussion followed about Toms Shoes and this amazing video: RadiAid for Norway. There were multiple levels of interpretation and understanding.  Most students held that organizations like Toms Shoes have murky intentions at best but some held fast that companies like Toms Shoes have a valid pace in the service field. After observing these discussions, I had several follow up questions which Nora has graciously answered below.

    Q: What course or experience influenced you the most to become a critical proponent of service-learning?
    A: I was lucky to take several service learning courses early in my undergraduate education at Villanova. One course in particular was about urban education and we worked with several different faculty members from different departments and traveled to Olney High School once a week to tutor in the afterschool program. The course tremendously influenced my path – I spent two years teaching at a bilingual K-8 school in Philadelphia and I am now working on my dissertation for my PhD in Urban Education!
    Q: Why add domestic service to a course about international service?
    Well, “Education for Liberation: Here and Abroad” does address international situations, but overall it explores non-western educational traditions and asks how we might learn from other traditions and apply ideas to the education system in our city. Whether service is down the street or across international borders, it involves university students “crossing borders” and engaging in cross-cultural interactions and relationships. There is increasing attention to adopting the term global service learning instead of embracing a division between domestic and international service learning.
    Q: What do you want students to get out of your class?
    I think overall, I want my students to start to understand just how complex problems are. We so often see short sound bites that over simplify issues or situations, but the problems in our world are complex. Otherwise, they would have been solved already! Examining problems from different perspectives and disciplines and then experiencing a small piece of these problems outside the classroom in a community site, just starts to scratch the surface of the complexity in the world around us. I hope that my students will view and investigate problems and situations they encounter differently after the class.
    Q: You use the Wasala project as a clear example of the complicated nature of international service-learning. How do we, as service-learning professionals, set an example for our students?
    Most importantly, I think we need to openly embrace and share our own concerns and criticisms of this work to set an example of continually pushing ourselves to improve. I openly voice my concerns and discuss the ethical considerations inherent in this work. I try to create a classroom atmosphere where we can all question each other. I use the Waslala project as an example in class because the students know it is a project I lead, but I share my concerns with them and we spend time critiquing the work and seeking ideas for improvement.
    Nora Reynolds graduated from Villanova University in 2002 with a B.A. in Communication and Spanish. She then moved to Madrid, Spain to pursue a Masters in International Development at La Universidad Complutense. After returning to the United States, she spent two years teaching at a bilingual school in North Philadelphia through Teach for America while she completed her MS in Elementary Education. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Urban Education at Temple.
    Learn more about Nora’s projects here:
    Water for Waslala : www.waterforwaslala.org
    Workshop on community outcome assessment in global SL:

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