Powell Center Awards Its 25th Faculty Fellowship, cont.

“The Powell Center’s Faculty Fellowship program is the cornerstone of the Center’s service-learning work on campus,” says former Powell Center Deputy Director Andrew Rich. Professor Rich was an early advocate of service learning at the Powell Center, after participating in a similar program at Wake Forest University. “By putting students into community service placements to work on real problems, you bring your course material to life.”

Catherine Franklin, assistant professor of education, wholeheartedly agrees. She teaches Inquiry in Education, which requires 15 hours of field experience. This past semester, she adapted the course so students could fulfill their fieldwork obligation through service. Some students tutored elementary-school students at the East Harlem Tutorial Program. Others assisted in the Discovery Room at the American Museum of Natural History. In all cases, service placements invigorated the students’ educational experience.

“These students have been able to move from simply observing to actually interacting with children and their environment,” Professor Franklin says, “Now when we talk about what to do with a resistant student, their responses are much more grounded and reflective of their experiences. They’re noticing much more about what’s going on in the environment, and they’re invested in the outcome. These students are truly getting a taste of what it’s like to be a teacher, and some of them haven’t even declared a major yet.”

Experiences like Dr. Franklin’s help spread the word on campus about how valuable service learning can be. “A culture of acceptance for service and civic engagement has really grown at CCNY,” says Powell Center Deputy Director Nora Heaphy. The Center’s efforts are part of a larger movement across hundreds of campuses nationwide to ground education more deeply in an ethic of service. But CCNY program is unique in attempting to develop service learning (which often requires a fair amount of time and support) on a public, urban campus. In such settings, the program may be more difficult to pull together, given the demands on student time and resources. Still, its benefits to CCNY’s students and the college’s long standing social mission, service learning is an utterly appropriate approach to education. Over the past few years at CCNY, it’s being built one faculty fellow at a time.