Integrating teaching, learning, and community outreach: Western Carolina's local government youth assembly.

• Author: Knotts, H. Gibbs

Although research and service contributions are important, it is a love for teaching that motivates many college faculty members. Excellent teachers often inspired faculty to pursue careers in higher education, and, for many, working with students is the major activity each day. While teaching remains the primary mission for most university faculty, the authors of this study argue that teaching, learning, and community outreach can be integrated in a more holistic sense. This is evident in a unique initiative of Western Carolina University's Public Policy Institute and the university's Pi Gamma Mu chapter, the local government youth assembly. This study first addresses the traditional teaching model and recent efforts to supplement traditional instruction approaches. It then highlights the planning and implementation of the youth assembly, an event that involves both faculty and students in teaching, learning, and community service.

Traditional Instruction

The protocol for teaching students from junior high school to graduate school often involves desks arrayed in columns and rows. Sitting at these desks are students who, just last night, read the next chapter of the textbook and who now listen to a teacher's lecture and take notes. This traditional approach is probably as effective as anything else for the memorization of large quantities of facts. Moreover, it is arguably much easier to tell students that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit than it is to set up a stove and a thermometer and observe what happens when the temperature of the water on the stove reaches that temperature.

Critics of the traditional instruction method complain that the facts that students memorize in this fashion usually do not remain in their memories for long. If students are lucky, the facts will stay in their memories until the examination is over. If not, they will be remembered as poor students. They also argue that the accomplishment of memorizing facts does not necessarily demonstrate any ability to do anything with those facts. The knowledge of facts may be substantially separate from what the implications of the facts look like. It is one thing to tell a medical student what a gangrenous liver looks like; it is quite another to direct the medical student to dissect an actual gangrenous liver and observe its appearance. Furthermore, traditional instruction trains students to be independent actors in the learning process. The notions of "working together" and "working cooperatively" have been denounced as methods of cheating. Accordingly, students are not trained to work with others and that can prove to be problematic when they enter an employment setting where cooperation is necessary for success.

The authors of this study are particularly concerned about the efficacy of the methodology of reading the textbook, hearing a lecture, and taking notes for the purpose of teaching students about government, politics, and citizenship. It is entirely possible for students to earn a college degree in political science without ever having seen a state legislature or a city council meet for the purpose of enacting state laws or local ordinances. It is entirely possible for students to earn that degree without ever having seen a political party convention meet for the purpose of electing party officers or selecting the party's nominees in the next general election. It is also entirely possible for students to earn that degree without ever attending a political rally. The nuances of how actors in the political arena talk to one another, bargain with one another, and use rhetoric disingenuously to avert unwanted attention and controversy will almost never be explained in a book or a lecture--and, even if they are, would not move students to action--but are observable in a real political event.

The reasons for sticking stubbornly to the traditional approach of instruction are heard frequently enough. Teachers are overworked already and do not have any appetite for the additional obligation of organizing field trips during the school day. Such field trips may interfere with the students' attendance in their other classes and thus meet with protest from their other instructors. Students' schedules outside of the school day are filled with part-time jobs, involvement in sports, attending after-school church classes, obligations at home such as chores or babysitting for siblings, and other responsibilities. In short, assignments to attend a city council meeting in the evening may be...