Community Service at The Ohio State University
This page recognizes outstanding service-learning and community service by Ohio State students, faculty, and staff.
- Scott Dudis: beginning a career of service
- Judy Guion-Utsler: expanding students’ worldview
- Eric Reynolds: engineering solutions for people
- 13 students gave and grew: service-learning in Honduras with students of Service-Learning Initiative director Golden Jackson
Scott Dudis
Ask Scott Dudis why he serves and he’ll tell you it’s become a habit: “It’s like exercising for some people: they can’t imagine going a week without going to the gym. Service becomes part of your life after a while.” The fourth-year student from Wyoming, Ohio, volunteered in high school, mentoring and tutoring middle school students and doing service projects as a Boy Scout. These experiences gave him a taste of leadership in community service, so when he came to Ohio State, he was attracted to the service-learning course by that name, EDU P&L 271. This course clarified the purpose of service-learning for Scott: “The biggest connection you make in a service-learning class is how much it opens your eyes to issues you never knew were going on before, If you’re practicing something at a service location, that experiential learning shows you—‘I never imagined that it could look, sound, smell, be like this’—totally different than when you read it in a book.” This kind of connection is more strategic and systematic in service-learning: “It’s not a given in other courses that you ever get a chance to apply the theory. Service-learning opens avenues to actually doing what you learn in class much more directly than in other courses.”
Scott has brought this perspective to other service leadership activities. He became involved with Student Leaders for Service and Activism, a student organization sponsored by the Service-Learning Initiative. As president, he led the organization to grow and change. “The second year we decided to change our name to the SERVICE Squad, which stands for Student Education through Regular Voluntary Involvement in Community Empowerment, because we wanted our volunteers to know they were everyday superheroes in the real world. Whether or not you are saving the world from disaster, for one person you are saving their world from disaster, making a difference in their life. No amount of service can be considered insignificant.”
When he was in high school, his church youth group began a Halloween project that collected two bags of canned food for people in need. Continuing a similar activity each year, Scott transformed it into “A Very Sharey Halloween.” Now sponsored by his fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon, the 2008 event collected over 2,200 pounds of food. Scott developed a business plan for the project that included soliciting donations from South Campus Gateway businesses as incentives for the target audience: first-year students. “There needs to be a real clear strategic plan to target identified community needs. You need to identify target audience, what benefit there is to participate, who will benefit and how, and be able to explain all this clearly in advance.” Applying the lessons of EDU P&L 271, the business plan included an evaluation that offered participating students reflection questions: “Think about the issues that might cause the problems we’re trying to address today. How can you as an individual influence those problems effectively? Think about an issue that is personally meaningful to you and consider how you could influence it. What are you going to do about it?”
A service-learning class, says Scott, “gives you a vocabulary to reference community issues. By including the evaluation, we hoped to provide a vocabulary for students who participated to use to address other problems outside the event. That may be the best part of this year over other years: providing that next step to make a really fun, exciting, beneficial service project become closer to a service-learning experience.’
What can be done to sustain service projects as students like Scott graduate and move on? Within his fraternity, Scott has advocated a long-range plan for community service. “My whole time at Sig Ep I’ve been asking them questions we were asked in service-learning class, to take the knowledge outside of class and apply it to life. When we’re doing service, are we picking activities that are fun or that will take us one step further to a goal that is valuable to us? So we set up quarterly service projects that address three main needs.”
Building a model for student organizations on effective and sustainable service, Scott understands that it is important to avoid “binder issue.” “You don’t want to create a program that is repeated solely out of information in a binder. The person in charge becomes a manager, not a director. As a manager, there is no leeway to make it better; you’re just repeating something designed years ago. So in a service project it’s likely that you repeat something that no longer matches community needs as needs change. When you supply information through a binder to a program director, that person can discuss needs with the community and modify the project as much as possible.”
Scott went right to the top in suggesting another way to encourage service more broadly for students at Ohio State. “When we met with the Board of Trustees I suggested that as a part of the GEC, they require a service-learning class, even if it’s just an introductory course. There are ways to incorporate it into the curriculum that wouldn’t add an extra burden for students or faculty or increase time to graduation.” He also sees complementary roles for the Ohio Union (getting students started with service activities) and the Service-Learning Initiative (taking students to the next level with deeper involvement and integration of theory and practice). Says Scott, “Encouraging students to that level is the difference between service-learning and volunteering or charity.”
Scott received the 2007 Charles J. Ping Student Community Service Award from Ohio Campus Compact and the 2005 Student Award for Excellence in Community Service from the Service-Learning Initiative. He was also recognized as an Outstanding Senior award in the Ohio Union’s 2009 Leadership Awards.
Judy Guion-Utsler
Educating Engaged Citizens: Profile of a Service-Learning Course
Getting students to “expand the size of their bubble” is Judy Guion-Utsler’s goal for EDU P&L 271, Leadership in Community Service. Since 1998, this course has been a model for connecting theory and practice. Required for Mount Scholars and students in the First Education Experience Program, the course attracts a cross-section of majors. Judy is one of two doctoral students currently teaching it on the Columbus campus.
The class structure includes typical elements of a service-learning course: class readings and large and small group discussions, 3 hours of community service per week, and a weekly reflection journal. The service takes place in diverse community sites, including food pantries, the Short Stop Teen Center, the After-School Academic Program, Boys and Girls Club, Northside Library, Project Open Hand, and Somali Women’s and Children’s Alliance.
Connecting Academics and Service
The crucial step of preparing students for service is one opportunity to connect learning and service. The second class meeting addresses practical details such as how to get to the site as well as how to be effective and how to approach the experience with the right attitude. When students take the bus to a community site, they become aware that they are sharing the perspective of the working poor in the city. Observing racism, poverty, or hunger at their sites furthers their learning beyond an academic exercise. A formal presentation incorporating research on an issue related to their service site includes the provocative question “What would it take in the world for this service to be no longer needed?”
Changing Mindsets and Worldviews
Judy’s explicit goal for the course is transformation. Her students have varied economic backgrounds and experience with service, so for some, the “ripped from the headlines” experience of seeing people driven to use food pantries by today’s economy is eye opening. Their response is deepened by connecting it with readings and research on such issues as poverty, privilege, and racism. Judy aims to shift their attitudes about service from the one-way, “I’m helping you” mindset to the mutuality of partnership and recognition of a community that has assets, not deficits. Similarly, she wants to change their concept of leadership from the notion that it is tied to a role or position to the perspective that everyone can lead by using their own assets. The weekly reflection journals and three required essays show that some students “don’t get from point A to point A.1, whereas others shift from A to Z.” Ultimately, Judy would like them to be able to “articulate other people’s point of view without judging or necessarily agreeing with it.”
The course is constantly evolving, and she is in the process of incorporating changes such as making the reflections more structured (because research shows that high-quality reflection leads to better learning outcomes) and adding such topics as religious tolerance, environmentalism, and globalization to the class readings/discussions.
Judy is passionate about the benefits service-learning can have for students’ academic performance and civic participation, and she recommends that anyone who can should find ways to incorporate it into a course. Building and maintaining partnerships with community organizations is extremely important; the most successful relationships are characterized by good communication and clear expectations for instructors, students, and community partners. A well-planned service-learning course fulfills Ohio State’s mission of educating engaged citizens. For Judy, this means helping students see that “everyone has the opportunity to be from a dominant culture and everyone can learn to be ally for those in nondominant groups.”
Eric Reynolds
In June 2009, Hilliard native Eric Reynolds, (Hilliard Davidson High School), earned a degree in mechanical engineering with three minors: chemistry, philosophy and international development studies. In addition to an outstanding academic career, Eric was very active in service projects and was the undergraduate student representative on the Service-Learning Initiative advisory board. He also was involved with the “Beanie” Drake Student Leadership Endowment Board.
As a leader of the student organization Engineers for Community Service, Eric organized and led many service projects and events, ranging from building wheelchair ramps and giving computer lessons for Columbus residents, designing and building pedal-powered machines for people in Guatemala, and developing water quality projects for orphans with HIV/AIDS in rural Honduras. In Guatemala, he spent time with children aspiring to be designers and mechanics. He says: “These kids—despite being regularly exposed to violence, sickness, and even the death of loved ones—thrive in the workshop. They embody strength and dedication I have never seen elsewhere. As is the case with all service-learning projects, I learned much more from these amazing people than they could have ever learned from me.”
His undergraduate honors thesis on the design of an implantable artificial kidney, a project he worked on over the past 4 years, took first place at the Undergraduate Research Forum.
Eric hopes eventually to earn a Ph.D. in engineering and public policy and continue to work to make science and technology work more appropriately for all people. He is deferring additional education for the summer to participate in a design team at the 2009 International Development Design Summit hosted by MIT and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana.
Eric received the Service-Learning Initiative's 2009 Student Award for for Excellence in Community Service. Other recognitions include the 2005 Outstanding First-Year Student and 2009 Outstanding Senior awards in the Ohio Union’s 2009 Leadership Awards and the Rob Wolf Outstanding Senior in Mechanical Engineering award.
