WAUKESHA – Founding director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Institute for Service Learning, Dean Pribbenow will deliver the 2001 faculty appreciation lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha on Tuesday, August 28. He will speak at 10:30 a.m. in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on “Service Learning: Teaching, Learning, and Citizenship in the 21st Century.”
Annually sponsored by the UW-Waukesha foundation, the Friends and Alumni of UWW, Inc., to inspire and motivate faculty and staff, the lecture also is open to the public at no charge.
Service learning is a teaching approach that integrates community-based activities with academic coursework. In specially designed courses, students engage in organized service to enhance their learning and serve the community at the same time. A national movement is afoot to incorporate service learning into the curriculum.
Pribbenow and Kathleen Dale, a senior lecturer in English who teaches in UW-Milwaukee’s Academic Opportunity Center and has employed service learning in her instruction, will discuss their experiences with service learning.
In 1997, UW-Milwaukee then-chancellor John Schroeder appointed a task force to explore how service learning would affect UW-Milwaukee’s mission and strategic plan. Nine months later, it issued a report recommending an institute be established at the urban university. Schroeder retired from administration, but the new chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, was familiar with the concept and immediately signed on to fund the program.
In the summer of 1999 Pribbenow was appointed its first director. He hired staff, identified its mission, developed goals, formed an advisory board, and got the program off to a start. Last February, he turned a functioning unit over to a new director and moved to the Center for Instructional and Professional Development, where he is assistant director and enjoying “an opportunity that allows me to support faculty who engage in innovative teaching, including service learning.”
The service learning program remains in the Center for Urban Initiatives and Research, which is charged with promulgating the Milwaukee Idea.
In the more than two years the Institute for Service Learning has been operating, it has gained momentum. The number of classes incorporating the service element in coursework has grown tenfold from 3 to about 30.
The numbers are not the best indicator of its success, however. Faculty report a favorable impact on student learning; students are gaining interpersonal skills and knowledge of the community; while people in the community are receiving a higher level of service.
“Of course it’s an ongoing challenge to maintain the quality and rigor of the service learning experience,” Pribbenow admits, “but that’s the purpose of ISL – to promote and support the use of service learning.”
Selected by the University Convocations Committee, the faculty appreciation lecturer generally delivers a presentation just before the start of the school year. Classes begin September 4, 2001. For information about UW-Waukesha programs or admissions, contact the Student Services Office at (262) 521-5200, via e-mail at wakinfo@uwc.edu, or visit the Web site at waukesha.uwc.edu. |
