Service-learning: Partnering with the public as a component of college archaeology courses

Abstract

"Service-learning," is the higher education reform movement to connect community service to academic courses. Since the 1960s, it has involved summer internships (both paid and unpaid), course credit internships, placing students in government agencies for a semester, experiential education, field-study courses, urban semesters involving students in diverse antipoverty programs, and has even included international study programs. In the 1960s, with the establishment of the Peace Corps and VISTA, universities became interested in providing opportunities for students to gain "real world" experiences by working in communities through internship programs. In 1971, the National Center for Service-Learning was established to help promote community outreach and one of the efforts was to help high school and college administrations evaluate ways to offer credit for servicelearning experiences (Bounous, 1997: 5). In the 1970s, there was federal funding for students to engage in community internship as part of the antipoverty programs. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration cut federal funding for paid anti-poverty program internships, and community service moved to a model where the work was connected to academic courses (Lounsbury and Routt, 2000: 28). The National Community Service Act of 1993, signed by President William Jefferson Clinton, further strengthened these academic initiatives for public outreach. Today, the term "servicelearning" is "typically used to refer to a course-based, credit-bearing educational experience where students participate in organized service that meets community needs, and reflect on the service to gain further understanding of course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility" (Lounsbury and Routt, 2000: 27). Often these service-learning courses are offered in departments of sociology, education, planning, political science, government, labor relations, but usually archaeology courses are notably absent. However, archaeology courses could integrate community service simply as a module within the courses. This chapter discusses how "partnering with the public" can be integrated into college archaeology courses by way of service-learning. The examples come from 15 years of archaeological service-learning courses at Cornell University. This ongoing endeavor has resulted in public programs as well as diverse interdisciplinary research.