May 22, 2003
Doing, defining ‘good work’ is focus of class
What constitutes “good work?”
This is the central question explored in an innovative class offered by Britt Yamamoto, doctoral candidate in geography. The class, titled “Critical Engagements with Service and Community: Working in Civil Society,” is in many ways a capstone class without the official designation. Using service learning as the central element of the class, Yamamoto guides students in analyzing their experiences, to help them understand the theoretical foundations that underlie concepts of service, philanthropy and civil society.
“I wanted to find a way to help prepare students to act on their convictions and concerns,” Yamamoto says. “But I also wanted them to put to use the critical thinking tools that they have learned.”
Yamamoto is a big fan of service learning but wants to see it done the right way, to maximize its impact. “There can be a disconnect,” he says. “If what the student experiences in the service learning site isn’t tied to the political and social context, it can lead to oversimplified explanations of what the student has experienced. There needs to be a connection between the classroom and the community.”
Yamamoto was a recipient of a Huckabay fellowship, which supports innovative teaching by graduate students. He worked with his faculty advisor and Huckabay mentor, associate professor Lucy Jarosz, and they received support in winter quarter to prepare the course. As part of the fellowship, the eight recipients, from a variety of disciplines met once a week to discuss their ideas. Some participants had already taught their course, while others were still in development.
“This worked out well for me,” Yamamoto says. “I was able to bounce ideas off of the other people. The meetings helped me develop an approach to teaching that would bring out the students’ ideas. I also worked with the Center for Instructional Development and Research, which helped me understand teaching as a form of research, to approach teaching issues with a series of questions I could address.”
The call for a “more engaged citizenry” spans the political spectrum in this country. Students have responded; the University has responded too, by creating the Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center, among other things.
Yamamoto, who has worked at the Carlson Center, engages the students by exposing them to different theoretical ideas about the creation of a civil society.
“The students who were drawn to this class are interested in social change,” he says. “The class addresses such questions as where and how to do that. You shouldn’t leave your analytic and theoretical tools at the door when you work for social change. In many ways, this class interrogates what I see as a problematic divide between being an intellectual and being an activist.”
Students are challenged to examine whether their volunteer activity is promoting change or perpetuating things as they are. They also learn where, on the spectrum of social change and service, they are comfortable. Yamamoto hopes that this kind of knowledge is helpful as students prepare for the world of work.
“There’s an incredible diversity of opportunities for creating change, in both the public and private sectors,” says Yamamoto, who worked as an organic farmer in California after receiving his bachelor’s degree. He also was involved in K-12 and adult education before returning to school for his doctorate. The class of 13 is just about the right size: “This course demands a lot of attention, a lot of personal interaction. I try to give the students a great deal of individual feedback, perhaps more than they would in a typical course.”
The first class assignment is to have students describe what good work means to them. For many students, Yamamoto says, good work is predicated on the idea of helping others. This almost always means, to them, work involving the government or a nonprofit. “Sometimes these assumptions make it difficult to convince students that the private sector also can do good work, in the same way that the government and nonprofit sectors can perpetuate inequalities. To be sure, no sector has domain over the term.”
Charlie Rogers, a junior majoring in the comparative history of ideas, finds the course has been helpful in deciding what it means to be an engaged citizen. “Some of the theory we’ve been touching on has helped me to realize how necessary, but problematic, social services really are,” he says. “From this, I have begun thinking more about how to fix sources of problems and not just symptoms.”
“I could probably relate everything that we’ve learned in class with my service learning (at the League of Education Voters). Class writing assignments as well as in-class discussions have forced me to engage my experiences gained from service learning. This information is so valuable to receive now, because it has helped me to more accurately choose what actions will help me now to get me where I want to go after school.”
Service-learning sites have noticed a difference in Yamamoto’s class. The involvement with the UW is more intensive and there’s more communication, says Lisa Markovchick-Nicholls, volunteer coordinator at People for Puget Sound, whose organization has been involved in UW service learning projects before. “We have more conversations with Britt and with the students. It’s clear the students are learning more about how nonprofits work and how society works. The learning experience is occurring in a much broader context. The students tend to be more involved in the service experience. They’re having more fun and they’re more productive, too.”
Although the Geography Department has plans to offer the course in the fall, it’s not clear that Yamamoto will have the time to teach and still continue his doctoral research. The course is somewhat labor intensive if it’s done properly. But courses like this will be in his future, certainly in the longer term. “This has been an unbelievable experience for me,” he says. “This is a course that needed to be taught, and to see how students and community partner organizations have responded has been very rewarding.”
