Bringing an Ethnographic Sensibility to Service-Learning Assessment.

How do we know if students are learning? A number of years ago Arthur Keene, co-author of this article, gave a presentation to the UMass-Amherst administration on some new work we were doing in community service learning. He grounded the presentation in the personal stories of students who had embraced their course work and service with great passion, students who had become increasingly reflective and sophisticated and who saw their courses as significant transformative experiences. One case he cited was the story of Seth, an engineering student who, as a sophomore, had wandered into an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) class (Addes & Keene, 2006). Seth was finding his engineering classes increasingly alienating as it became harder for him to link his concerns with social and economic justice to his schoolwork. He was considering changing his major to anthropology. During a trip to a rural community in the South, we were asked if we could build two handicapped ramps for community buildings. Our hosts had no design plans and a very small budget. Seth was one of only two students on the trip with any construction or design experience. He set out to design and supervise the construction of two ramps, soliciting donated materials from local businesses, recycling materials from recent demolitions, and instructing the other students in matters of construction. The ramps are still in use today. Following the trip Seth had an epiphany in which he was able to link his own technical expertise to his capacity to make change (1). He decided to remain in engineering and is working today in the field of alternative energy. At one point in Keene's presentation the Provost intervened. "This is all well and good, "she said," but how do you know that your students actually are learning? " Keene thought that the answer was obvious. Enthusiasm, commitment, reflection, insight, and transformation were all pretty good benchmarks of educational success he reasoned. And he was quite certain that the students' ability to work in partnership with their hosts showed that they were applying what they had learned in anthropology and community development. The Provost, a quantitative sociologist by training, was unimpressed. "Prove it! " she demanded. Keene reasoned that he had been in the field with these students. He had seen them work, seen them struggle with getting comfortable in a community quite unlike their own. He had seen them bump up against their own ethnocentrism, seen them reflect critically on their own practice and on the applicability of their classroom preparation. And he had seen them grow personally and intellectually. Keene argued that there was ineffable learning going on that was not reducible to conventional academic measurement. He felt certain that there was no exam that would begin to measure their grasp of praxis. And he suspected that many others who had taught or taken a field course or had engaged in service-learning knew this too. He had seen the knowing nods amongst his colleagues when he had shared student stories. So he was a bit vexed that the Provost didn't seem to get it. As an anthropologist he recognized the value that narrative and thick description could have. But how could one quantify these experiences? Was it necessary? Was it even possible? These were the questions that launched him into an exploration of alternative approaches to assessment and into a partnership with Deborah Polin, co-author of this article, who found herself teaching service-learning courses at UMass after working in the field of educational evaluation. We never learned for certain whether the Provost was pleased with our efforts at alternative assessment (Keene, 2003). But twice Keene heard her talking about the ASB class in public forums and both times she had shared the story of Seth to illustrate how through service-learning, students found meaning in what they were doing by making the connection between course work and vocation. …