ARTICLES
Deepening College Students’ Engagement with Religion
and Theology through Community Service Learning
Scott Seider, Boston University
Abstract. The Serve Program at Ignatius University combines academic study of theology with a year-long community service project focused on combating poverty. An
analysis of the Serve Program during the 2008–09 academic year revealed that participating students demonstrated a significant increase in their interest in theology; a
greater desire to enroll in theology coursework; and a deeper interest in theology than
classmates not participating in the service-learning program. Interviews with Serve participants revealed that their exposure to poverty and inequality through their service
placements led them to read the program’s assigned theological texts with a particular
focus on the authors’ messages about individual and social responsibility for struggling
fellow citizens.
Introduction
UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) defines community service learning as “a form of experiential learning where students and faculty collaborate with communities to address problems and issues, simultaneously gaining knowledge and skills
and advancing personal development” (2009). Over the past two decades, opportunities
for both community service and community service learning have become widespread
on university campuses across the United States. One recent study found that 65 percent
of college students described their respective institutions as offering opportunities to
participate in community service or community service learning (Liu et al. 2009).
Another study found that 43 percent of American college students reported participating
in some form of community service in the past year (CIRCLE 2009). Moreover,
Campus Compact – an organization dedicated to promoting community service
opportunities on college campuses – now counts approximately one fourth of all
American colleges and universities as members (2009).
For over two decades now, community service learning opportunities have been
common experiences for students in pre-professional disciplines such as nursing and
education as well as for students majoring in social sciences such as sociology and
political science (Bennett 1987). In contrast, Handley characterizes humanistic disciplines such as philosophy and English as “playing a minor role in the spread of
service-learning” because “humanities, it is assumed, is the territory of abstraction and
reflection, but not action” (2001, 52). Over the past several years, however, interest has
been growing in the use of community service learning among a number of humanistic
disciplines including theology and religious studies. In a recent paper on teaching an
introductory religion course, Thompson explained that “One of my operational goals for
the course is that students will see that religion matters in how it shapes, guides, and
directs ethical activity in the world” (2005, 89). Thompson identified community service
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learning as a useful lever for helping her to meet this learning objective. In her words,
“To achieve this goal, it is essential for students to have more than textual exposure to
religion” (2005, 89).
In this paper, we offer a review of the scholarship by Thompson and others on the
use of community service learning in university-level religion and theology courses.
This extant scholarship offers a valuable resource for religion and theology faculty who
are already engaged in or who are considering incorporating community servicelearning pedagogy into their own teaching. However, virtually all of this existing scholarship could be characterized as descriptive rather than empirical. With the present study
of the Serve Program at Ignatius University during the 2008–09 academic year, we seek
to address this gap in the research literature with a study of a theology-based servicelearning experience in which we take an empirical approach using both quantitative and
qualitative research methods. Our hypothesis at the outset of this study was that participation in the Serve Program’s theology-based service-learning experience would deepen
participating students’ interest and engagement with religion and theology course
content. We begin with a description of the Serve Program itself and then share the
results of our investigation of the program’s impact upon participating undergraduates.
Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how the combination of theology coursework
and field-based community service impacted the learning of participating students, and
consider the larger questions raised by such a pairing.
The Serve Program
Ignatius University is a four-year Catholic university in a large American city.1 Since its
founding more than a century ago, Ignatius University has required its undergraduates to
engage in philosophy and theology coursework. Today, all undergraduates at Ignatius
University, regardless of their major, enroll in two theology courses and two philosophy
courses as a requirement for graduation.
The Serve Program began at Ignatius University in the 1970’s as an elective through
which students could meet the university’s philosophy and theology requirements. By
combining philosophy, theology, and community service, the Serve Program sought to
demonstrate the relevance of philosophy and theology to the real world as well as to
provide an opportunity for Ignatius University students to “serve others and foster
social change.” According to the Serve Program’s website, its mission is “to educate
our students about social injustice by putting them into direct contact with marginalized
communities and social change organizations and by encouraging discussion on classic
and contemporary works of philosophy and theology.”
The academic component of the Serve Program is a year-long course taught by
members of Ignatius University’s philosophy and theology faculty. While the content of
the course varies somewhat across the twelve faculty members who teach in the Serve
Program, typical theological readings assigned to students include Augustine’s Confessions, Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Himes’s Doing the Truth in Love, Cahill’s The Gifts
of the Jews, Lebacqz’s Six Theories of Justice, Nolan’s Jesus Before Christianity, Day’s
From Union Square to Rome, De Mello’s The Way to Love, and Hedges’s Losing Moses
on the Freeway. Students also read selections from the Old and New Testaments,
Catholic Social Teachings, and the Bhagavad Gita.
1
Ignatius University, the Serve Program, and all students named in this paper are referred to by
pseudonyms and are not associated with Boston University.
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Students in the Serve Program meet three times a week for hour-long lectures on the
assigned readings and also participate in a weekly discussion section led by their respective professors. In the discussion sections, students have an opportunity to seek clarification and pose questions about the lectures and readings, but the discussion section also
represents an opportunity for students to draw connections between the academic work
of the Serve Program and the community service placements that are a required component of the Serve experience. In a previous paper, we discussed the key role of this discussion section in providing students with an opportunity to reflect with classmates upon
the relationships between their course readings and community service experiences
(Seider et al. 2009).
In addition to these academic experiences, all Ignatius University students enrolled in
the Serve Program choose a community service project from a roster of more than fifty
opportunities that include tutoring urban elementary school students, working in the
emergency room of a public hospital, and helping low-income families apply for affordable housing. Students devote ten to twelve hours a week to their respective service
placements for the entire academic year. As is evident from even these few examples,
there is great variety in the types of service experiences available to students; however,
all of the service placements share the commonality of serving individuals or groups
contending with poverty. In other words, the placements have deliberately been chosen
by Serve faculty and administrators to bring participating students into contact with
individuals from struggling and marginalized constituencies.
Because the Serve Program represents a streamlined pathway for Ignatius University
students to satisfy the university’s philosophy and theology requirements (taking one
year-long course instead of four semester-long courses), every year nearly five hundred
students express interest in the four hundred places available in the program. The Serve
Program fills these four hundred seats via a randomized registration lottery, and then
places the remaining students who have expressed interest in the program on a wait list.
In our study of the Serve Program during the 2008–09 academic year, we considered
the ways in which the Ignatius University students in the Serve Program changed in
their attitudes towards theology over the course of their year-long participation in the
program. We also compared these students’ changing attitudes towards theology to
those of their classmates on the Serve Program wait list. The Ignatius University students on the Serve wait list form an ideal comparison group because these students,
too, expressed interest in participating in the Serve Program but were excluded from
the experience as a result of their (randomly assigned) low number in Ignatius
University’s course registration lottery. These students on the wait list are welcome
to seek participation in the Serve Program in a future academic year.
Research Context
There have been several hundred published research studies of community service
learning at the university level over the past twenty years, the majority of which have
reported positive effects from these experiences. For example, Giles and Eyler found
that college students participating in a service-learning experience as part of a human
development course became more confident about their ability to influence social issues
and less likely to blame social service clients for their struggles (1994). Kendrick
reported that the students participating in service-learning through a sociology course
demonstrated significant gains in their beliefs about social responsibility and personal
efficacy (1996). Boss found that students in a philosophy course participating in
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service-learning demonstrated significant gains in their moral reasoning ability (1994).
Other studies have found participation in community service learning to be associated
with a deeper understanding of complex social problems (Batchelder and Root 1994),
increased racial and religious tolerance (Barber et al. 1997; Myers-Lipton 1998),
increases in empathy and civic engagement (Eyler, Giles, and Braxton 1997), feelings of
responsibility for the wellbeing of others (Flanagan 2004; Markus, Howard, and King
1993), and later participation in community service as an adult (Oesterle, Johnson, and
Mortimer 2004). Certainly there are studies of service-learning experiences that have
yielded null or even negative effects upon participants (McLellan and Youniss 2003);
however, on balance, the research literature suggests that participation in community
service learning experiences during the college years is a largely positive experience
with significant effects upon participating students’ beliefs, values, and worldviews. As
for how community service learning influences the beliefs and behaviors of participating
students, we turn to work by psychologist James Youniss on community service learning
and identity development during emerging adulthood.
Theoretical Framework: Community Service Learning and Identity Development
Psychologist Erik Erikson defined the term ideology as a “system of ideas that provides
a convincing world image,” and he famously characterized adolescence (thirteen to eighteen years old) as the life stage in which young people begin to shape their mature adult
identities by seeking out “values and ideologies that transcend the immediate concerns
of family and self” (1968, 32). In other words, Erikson conceived of adolescence as the
period of life in which individuals move beyond a blind adherence to the values and
ideologies of their nuclear family (and home community) and seek out new and different ideological structures that will help them to organize their growing understanding
of the world.
Erikson conceived of this “identity crisis” as occurring during adolescence;
however, psychologist Jeffrey Arnett argues that societal factors such as the increase
in age of those entering marriage and parenthood as well as the “prolonged pursuit”
of higher education have shifted the period of primary identity exploration from adolescence to emerging adulthood (approximately eighteen to twenty-six years old). In
other words, according to Arnett and other emerging adult scholars, currently it is
during emerging adulthood – the developmental period that encompasses the college
years – that individuals are most actively seeking out and exploring new ideologies
and value systems that will help them make sense of the world and their role in it
(Arnett 2000, 2004).
Drawing on this work by Erikson and Arnett, psychologist James Youniss and colleagues have reported that community service learning experiences can be a powerful
mechanism for introducing emerging adults to new ideologies and values systems (Yates
and Youniss 1996; Youniss et al. 1997; Youniss 2009). According to these scholars, community service learning offers emerging adults “participatory experiences” with both the
recipients of the service as well as the professionals organizing the service experiences.
Such interactions can “encourage reflections on moral and political questions” (Yates
and Youniss 1996, 87). Moreover, Youniss and Yates suggest that these interactions at
community service placements can “provide direct exposure to explicit ideological orientations or worldviews . . . [which] allows youth to test ideological positions that can
then be rejected or built into their developing ideologies” (1997, 623). In short, Youniss
and colleagues characterize community service learning as an important mechanism for
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introducing emerging adults to ideologies and value systems that they may have never
previously explored or considered.
Community Service Learning in Religion and Theology Courses
Despite all of the scholarship cited above on the impact of community service learning
upon participating college students, relatively few of these studies focused on religion
or theology courses. However, there does seem to be a growing interest in community
service learning among religion and theology scholars. In the study of community service
learning mentioned previously, Thompson (2005) divided the students in her Introduction
to Religion course into small groups and assigned these groups to spend ten hours volunteering for a particular religious organization engaged in providing a service to the community. Students simultaneously carried out more traditional research projects on the
history and practices of the various religious organizations for which they were volunteering. Thompson believed that, for her students, these service-learning experiences served
to “broaden and challenge their vision of actual religious communities and their lived
commitments,” and she reported that the majority of her students characterized these
service-learning experiences as worthwhile and meaningful (2005, 89).
Similarly, Batten chose to incorporate into her course on “the historical Jesus”
a requirement that students spend sixteen to twenty hours volunteering at one of a
number of different service placements that included a food bank, AIDS hospice center,
community center for mentally disabled adults, and homeless shelter. According to
Batten, “I thought it would be a concrete way to focus on the life and ministry of
Jesus, and it would temper the inevitable tensions which arise when employing critical
approaches [to studying Jesus’s life]” (2005, 109). Specifically, Batten found that the
community service learning experiences “provided a way for students who upheld
Biblical inerrancy to reflect more neutrally upon what they perceived to be threatening
ideas about the Bible and Jesus” while simultaneously offering a mechanism through
which “the suspicious and even anti-religious students . . . were willing to consider the
study of the historical Jesus as a worthwhile endeavor” (107).
Batten also offered several concrete examples of the influence of these various servicelearning experiences upon her students’ academic study of the historical Jesus. For
example, she noted of the students volunteering at the food bank and homeless shelter:
I asked the students to read an article on the Sermon on the Mount, which argued
that . . . a divine economy is one in which people do not need to worry about food
and clothing; in which an obsession with security no longer prevails. After having
worked with people who did worry each day if they would eat, these teachings
seemed to take on much more meaning for the students. (110)
According to Batten, these students’ experiences working with the poor helped them to
“appreciate just how powerful such a vision must have been for those scrambling to
obtain food in the ancient world” (111).
Batten offered a second example involving the students volunteering at the AIDS
hospice center. She explained:
It seemed to me that the course reading which argued that Jesus was healing
social illnesses as opposed to physical diseases, a notion that some students are
often shocked by, came more easily to the students working at the hospice. They
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knew that the residents were not going to get better physically, but they understood that there was tremendous healing needed in the social realm. (112)
From these and other examples, Batten characterized her students’ service-learning
experiences as “another text for the class” (emphasis in original) which offered students
new and important insights on the teachings and actions of Jesus (111).
The Religious Pastoral Studies department at the College of Mount St. Joseph offers
an immersion-based learning experience sponsored jointly by the college’s theology and
anthropology departments. The immersion component of the experience involves a six
to twelve day trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the St. Francis
Mission School in Honduras, or the Tierra Madre Charity Mission in New Mexico.
On these trips, students “participate in service learning with the local people in order
to learn directly from the people and to contribute to projects and services which will
enhance their way of life” (Trokan 2005, 135). Prior to the actual trip, students participate in a course co-taught by Mount St. Joseph theology and anthropology faculty in
order to “understand the history, culture, and spirituality of native peoples in their local
context” (138). According to Trokan:
The immersion curriculum offers students . . . the opportunity to place their own
faith values in dialogue with those of the indigenous culture. It is in this conversation that students are invited to examine which religious and Gospel values they
will appropriate in their own life. (143)
Trokan characterizes these immersion-based experiences as examples of “contextual
theology” – “a way of doing theology in which one takes into account the spirit and
message of the gospel; the tradition of the Christian people; [and] the culture in which
one is theologizing” (138).
The concept of contextual theology is also raised by West in his account of
community-based service-learning opportunities at the School of Theology at South
Africa’s University of Natal. According to West, “Without a clear commitment to
concrete forms of contextualization – such as community-based service learning
provides – there is a tendency for engagement and critical distance to follow parallel
paths that never quite connect” (2004, 80). In other words, West characterizes
community-based service learning as a mechanism for allowing students to integrate
their academic study of theology with their more personal engagement in religion
and religious traditions.
Finally, Grieb describes a course she taught entitled “Reading James in Haiti” in
which theology students spent seven weeks on campus studying the New Testament
letters of James as well as the history, culture, literature, and religion of Haiti. This
academic study was then followed by an eleven-day immersion trip to Haiti in which
participating students volunteered in a hospice or orphanage while living with Haitian
families in a rural village. According to Grieb, “The idea was not to ‘map’ our experiences in Haiti with particular verses from James, but instead to understand what
was happening around us and in us through the specific phrases of the letter as they
became relevant” (2003, 154). In terms of the effects of this immersion experience,
Grieb found that “My students reported learning far more about Haiti in the first
few days than they had learned in seven weeks of reading in preparation for our
visit” (154).
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Experiential Learning in Religion and Theology Courses
While the studies cited in the previous section represent much of the extant research
literature on community service learning in religion and theology courses, there is also
a small body of scholarship on the use of other types of experiential learning in such
courses. For example, in a variation on the immersion-based service-learning experience, Barclift notes that “More and more departments of theology and religious studies
are turning to study abroad programs to augment their curricula and to reinforce their
institutional philosophies on the world stage” (2001, 166). He describes his own experience teaching a Christology course in Israel and asserts that “These experiences put a
face on the poor and the oppressed, making the preference for the poor a concrete,
practical mandate rather than a mere theory” (166).
Oldstone-Moore offers another variation of the immersion-based service-learning
experience in her description of taking students on a three week, 1200 kilometer
pilgrimage in Japan. Prior to the immersion experience, Oldstone-Moore guided
her students in academic study of Buddhist and Japanese traditions, the practice of
pilgrimage, and the history and practices associated with the Shikoku pilgrimage in
particular. According to Oldstone-Moore, the pilgrimage “provides the student and
the instructor with an authentic context, and encounters with sensory experience
that all the media, textual work, and intellectual understanding of the classroom
cannot provide” (2009, 115). She adds: “Sustained experiential learning, whether
an extension of a traditional course or a means of shaping overseas learning, is a
powerful tool for addressing the aspects of religion difficult to reproduce in the
classroom” (121).
Finally, a number of other scholars have described their use of experiential
learning in the form of ethnographic research projects to heighten students’
engagement in studying religion and theology. For example, Patterson describes a
course offered by the Religious Studies department at Emory University in which
students were paired with religious community-based organizations and carried out
small ethnographic studies in which they sought through observations and interviews
“to learn more about and better understand the religious dimensions of our Community Partners’ organizations, ethics, and actions” (2003, 31). Likewise, Hamilton and
Gilbert incorporate ethnographic research projects into their sociology of religion
course out of a belief that “experiential learning would get the students more excited
about the concepts of the class and help them develop critical thinking skills to think
beyond certain stereotypes” (2005, 240). Specifically, Hamilton and Gilbert divided
their students into small groups, assigned them a particular religious group, and
instructed students to engage in participant observation at events and customs particular to that religious group. Students also carried out background research on their
assigned group. According to Hamilton and Gilbert, “The most positive outcomes
from the ethnographic process were the expressed increased sensitivity to other
members of the greater community and the increased tolerance of other faith
traditions” (243).
In short, there is a small but growing body of scholarship on the use of a range of
experiential learning experiences to support students’ learning and development in religious studies and theology courses. However, as previously noted, virtually all of these
studies could be characterized as descriptive. In this present study of the Serve Program
at Ignatius University, we draw on quantitative survey data and an experimental research
design to consider the effects of the Serve Program upon participating undergraduates’
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engagement and interest in theology. We then utilize our qualitative interview data and
the extant scholarship to consider how this community service learning experience
produced these effects.
Research Methods
Participants
This study focused on 362 Ignatius University students participating in the Serve
Program during the 2008–09 academic year as well as thirty-seven students who had
signed up to participate in Serve but who were randomly assigned to the program’s wait
list. These thirty-seven students formed this study’s comparison group. The students in
the Serve Program and on the wait list were proportionally similar in terms of gender,
race, age, and religion. It should be noted that (as might be expected at a Catholic institution), 215 of the 362 Serve participants identified as Catholic, as did twenty-three of
the thirty-seven students on the Serve Program’s wait list. It should also be noted that
the thirty-seven students on the Serve Program wait list may have decided to begin fulfilling Ignatius University’s theology requirement by enrolling in a stand-alone theology
course; by enrolling in a year-long “Great Books in Western Culture” course that also
satisfied Ignatius University’s philosophy and theology requirements; or by holding
off on such coursework altogether in the hopes of enrolling in the Serve Program in a
subsequent academic year. Unfortunately, data were not collected on which of these
pathways were pursued by individual students on the Serve wait list.
Data Collection
All of the students in the Serve Program and on the wait list completed surveys in
September of 2008 and then again in May of 2009 that solicited students’ opinions
about a variety of topics raised in the Serve Program. Most important for the purposes
of this study are the survey items pertaining to religion and theology, specifically,
questions about students’ interest in theology, desire to pursue additional theology
coursework, feelings of religiosity, commitment to attending religious services, desire
to integrate spirituality into their lives, and so forth.
Interviews were also conducted in April of 2009 with a diverse group of thirty
Ignatius University students enrolled in the Serve Program. To select these thirty participants, we requested that the twelve Jesuit University faculty members who taught
in the Serve Program nominate three or four students apiece who could offer diverse
perspectives on the Serve Program. These students were then contacted and invited
to participate in an interview about their experiences in the program. The interviews
were approximately one hour in length and engaged students in discussion of their
beliefs about the Serve Program’s effects upon their values, worldview, and attitudes
towards theology and religion. Prior to their participation in the study, all students
read and signed informed consent documents approved by the institutional review
board of the principal investigator’s affiliated university. Unfortunately, interviews
were not conducted with Ignatius University students on the Serve Program’s
wait list.
Data Analysis
Four different types of analyses were used to consider the effects of the Serve Program
upon participating students’ attitudes towards theology and religion. We offer brief
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descriptions here, but more substantive descriptions can be found in the footnotes. First,
we considered whether the students in the Serve Program demonstrated changes in their
interest in theology from the beginning of the Serve Program to the end of the Serve
Program.2 Next, we considered whether students in the Serve Program demonstrated
different attitudes towards religion and theology at the end of the program as compared
to their classmates on the wait list who had not participated in Serve.3 Third, we considered whether the students who characterized the Serve Program as most impactful were
also the students most likely to express an interest in pursuing additional theology
coursework.4 Finally, the interviews with thirty Serve students were audio recorded and
transcribed verbatim. Patterns and themes within these interview transcripts of students’
experiences within the Serve Program were then analyzed.5
Results
Here are the results of our analyses of this study’s survey data and interview data.
For interested readers, more detailed descriptions of these analyses can be found in
the footnotes.
Interest in Theology Coursework
On the surveys that Serve participants completed at both the beginning and end of the
2008–2009 academic year, one survey item asked participants to express their level of
agreement or disagreement with the following statement: “I intend to take more theology classes after Serve.”6 A comparison of students’ responses to this survey item at
the beginning and conclusion of the academic year revealed that Ignatius University
students participating in the Serve Program demonstrated a statistically significant
2
Considering whether the participants in the Serve Program demonstrated a significant change in
their mean attitude towards theology coursework involved a paired-samples t-test.
3
Considering the impact of the Serve Program upon participating students in comparison to
the students in the control group (the wait list) entailed conducting a between-groups analysis of
covariance. In this analysis, participation in Serve represented the independent variable, students’
post-intervention interest in theology represented the dependent variable, and students’ pre-intervention
interest in theology and feelings of religiosity were treated as covariates in order to control for any
preexisting differences between the experimental and control groups.
4
Considering the relationship between students’ shifts in attitudes about theology and their perception of their personal development as a result of the Serve Program entailed conducting ordinary least
squares (OLS) regression. In this analysis, students’ perceptions of their personal development represented the independent variable, students’ post-intervention interest in theology represented the dependent variable, and students’ pre-intervention interest in theology was treated as a covariate. Again, we
controlled for students’ feelings of religiosity upon the outcome.
5
Interview transcripts were coded using emic and etic codes drawn from the scholarship on moral
and civic development, service-learning, adolescent development, emerging adulthood, social justice
education, and civic engagement. Particular attention was paid to descriptions by students of the impact
of the Serve Program upon their beliefs about religion and the study of theology.
6
Students responded to these survey items along a 5-point Likert Scale in which a “1” represented
“Strong Disagreement with the given statement and a “5” represented “Strong Agreement” with the
given statement.
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increase in their interest in pursuing theology coursework.7 In other words, the students
participating in the Serve Program grew, on average, more interested in taking theology
courses over the course of their participation in the program.
Interest in Theology
Another survey item asked students to express their level of agreement or disagreement
with the following statement: “I have an interest in theology.” We used this survey item
to compare the attitudes towards theology of participants in the Serve Program to their
peers on the Serve wait list who had not participated in the Serve Program. There were
no significant differences between these two groups of students at the beginning of the
2008–09 academic year (before the Serve Program had begun) in terms of their interest
in theology. However, by the end of the academic year, the Ignatius University students
who had participated in the Serve Program demonstrated a significantly greater interest
in theology than did their peers on the Serve wait list.8 Because students were randomly assigned to either the Serve Program or the wait list, we can reasonably attribute
the differences between these two groups of students in their attitudes towards theology
to the effects of the Serve Program. In other words, the Serve Program seems to have
had the effect of increasing participating students’ interest in theology and desire to
pursue additional coursework in religion and theology upon completion of the Serve
Program.
Connecting the Serve Experience and Theology
A third survey item asked students to express their level of agreement or disagreement
with the following statement: “Serve was influential to my personal development.” Our
analyses demonstrated that agreement with this statement significantly correlated with a
heightened interest in theology at the conclusion of the Serve Program.9 In other words,
the students who characterized themselves as most impacted by the Serve Program were
also the students who demonstrated the greatest increases in their interest in theology
over the course of the academic year. Because correlation does not prove causation, this
7
On the initial survey completed in September of 2008, Serve participants offered a mean response
of 2.48 units (SD = .97) on this survey item along a 5-point Likert Scale in which a “1” represented
“Strong Disagreement” with the given statement and a “5” represented “Strong Agreement” with the
given statement. On the follow-up survey completed in May of 2009, Serve participants offered a mean
response on this same survey item of 2.84 units (SD = 1.10). A paired samples t-test revealed this shift
in attitude to be a statistically significant one (t(354) = 7.05, p < .0001).
8
On the initial survey conducted in September of 2008, the participants in the Serve Program demonstrated a mean interest in theology of 3.02 units (SD = .99) along a 5-point Likert Scale while the
students on the Serve wait list demonstrated a mean interest in theology of 3.23 units (SD = 1.01).
There is no significant difference (p < .05) between these two scores. However, on the follow-up survey
conducted in May of 2009, the participants in the Serve Program demonstrated a mean interest in theology of 3.34 units (SD = 1.07) while the students on the Serve wait list demonstrated a mean interest in
theology of 3.24 units (SD = .96). Analysis of covariance revealed statistically significant differences
between these two groups of students in their post-intervention interest in theology at the conclusion of
the academic year (F(1, 379) = 3.76, p < .02).
9
Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression revealed a significant positive relationship between an
increased interest in theology over the course of the academic year and students’ perception that the
Serve Program had been influential to their personal development (bPERSONDVT = .14, p = .01).
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finding does not unequivocally demonstrate that the Serve Program caused a deeper
interest in theology among participating students. However, it does reveal that the Ignatius University students who perceived the Serve Program to be a powerful experience
were the same students who characterized themselves as more interested and engaged
by theology than they had been at the outset of the 2008–09 academic year. This
finding, too, can be viewed as evidence of the positive impact of the Serve Program
upon participating students in terms of their interest and engagement with theological
readings and study.
Interest in Practicing Religion
While the above results focus on students’ interest in theology as an academic field of
study, we also surveyed students at the beginning and conclusion of the academic year
about the role of religion in their everyday lives. Specifically, we asked students to
predict how likely they were now or in the future to participate in a church or religious organization; discuss religion with family or friends; and strive to integrate spirituality into their lives. The students in the Serve Program showed small increases on
all three of these survey items from the beginning of the 2008–2009 academic year to
the end of the 2008–2009 academic year – a finding that is not surprising for students
immersed in the life and culture of a Catholic institution. What was notable, however,
was that there were no significant differences on any of these survey items between
the Serve participants and their classmates on the wait list at either the beginning or
conclusion of the 2008–09 academic year.10 In other words, the Serve Program did not
have a discernible effect upon participating students’ desire to incorporate traditional
indicators of religiosity into their day-to-day lives in comparison to their peers on the
program’s wait list. One might surmise from this finding that the Serve Program had a
stronger effect upon participants’ academic interest and engagement with theology than
upon their desire to incorporate religious practices into their lives on a day-to-day
basis.
Impact of Community Service Placements
Thus far we have sought to describe the impact of the Serve Program upon participating
students’ interest and engagement with religion, both as an academic field of study and
in their daily lives. As a means of considering how the Serve Program deepened participating students’ engagement with theology (while having little effect upon their interest
in day-to-day religious practices), we turn now to students’ perceptions of their fieldbased community service placements and the Serve Program’s assigned theological
texts.
Interviews with thirty Serve participants reveal that the community service placements in which they engaged through the Serve Program provided opportunities for
these students to witness poverty and inequality firsthand, in many cases for the first
time in their lives. Specifically, twenty-nine of the thirty interviewed students characterized their experiences at their community service placements as having deepened their
10
There were no statistically significant differences between the Serve participants and their classmates on the Serve waitlist in their current or expected participation in a church or religious organization (F[1, 374] = 0.00, p = .98); in their desire to integrate spirituality into their lives (F[1, 374] = .22,
p = .64); and in the frequency with which they engaged in discussion of religion with family and friends
(F[1, 374] = .04, p = .85).
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awareness of poverty and inequality. For example, education major Janessa Lortie,
whose service placement entailed tutoring low-income youth at an afterschool program,
explained, “I think there is a tendency in America to view America as a really wealthy
place and that we don’t really have as many poor people as we do. It has definitely been
influential in making it more real to me.” Likewise English major Angela Gutman
described tutoring disadvantaged middle and high school students as an opportunity to
see firsthand the realities that exist beyond the Ignatius University campus. According
to Gutman, “I feel like it made me kind of get out of this sort of Ignatius University
bubble. . . . I think that the Serve Program allows students to really see, wow, there
are certain issues going on in the community [and] I can contribute to resolving those
issues.” A third student, business major Liza Coakley, described her experience working
in a basic care medical van as “putting a face on poverty.” According to Coakley,
“It kind of opens my eyes to the actual problems.”
In short, virtually all of the Ignatius University students who participated in the Serve
Program credited their service placements with heightening their awareness of poverty
and inequality and rendering these issues more “concrete” and “real.” In so doing, these
students underscored the claims about community service learning and experiential
learning offered by a number of the religion and theology scholars in this study’s literature review. Recall, for example, that Barclift characterized experiential learning experiences in religion courses as capable of “put[ting] a face on the poor and oppressed”
and transforming theological arguments for aiding the poor into “a concrete, practical
mandate rather than a mere theory” (2001, 166). Likewise, Oldstone-Moore noted that
community service learning and experiential learning experiences can offer students
studying theology “a sensory experience that all the media, textual work, and intellectual understanding cannot provide” (2009, 115). As predicted by these and other scholars, the field-based community service placements in which Serve participants engaged
served to transform the issues of poverty and inequality from abstract social issues into
a “concrete” and relevant reality. And as we demonstrate below, this transformation
seemed to have a powerful effect upon participating students’ engagement with the
program’s assigned theological texts.
Reading and Reflecting upon Theological Texts
In the preceding section, several Serve participants characterized their community
service placements as piercing the “Ignatius University bubble” and raising their awareness of poverty and inequality. This heightened awareness seemed to have had a strong
impact upon the lens through which Serve participants read and reflected upon the program’s assigned theological texts. Specifically, in responding to an interview question
about what aspect of their assigned theological readings had most engaged them, fifteen
of the interviewed Serve participants cited portions of theological texts that focused on
individual and social responsibility for the poor and oppressed. For example, according
to economics major Lori Clarke, Albert Nolan’s Jesus Before Christianity focuses on
“how Jesus, as a person, lived with the poor people even though during that time they
were seen as sinners, and people shunned them because people wanted to get into
heaven. He was like, ‘No, you have to help these people because they are children of
God too.’ ” Clarke also pointed to Dorothy Day’s From Rome to Union Square, in
which she was struck by Day’s work on behalf of the poor and homeless in Chicago.
According to Clarke, “It wasn’t like a job that she had to do or felt like to get to God
she needed to do this. It was more like she is doing this because she sees God in these
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people, and it is like she is drawn to help.” Clarke characterized both of these texts as
highlighting for her the moral obligation to live in community with struggling fellow
citizens.
Another Serve participant, International Studies major Felicia Santos, cited a portion
of Father Michael Himes’s Doing the Truth in Love which focuses on the role of the
individual in alleviating the world’s problems. According to Santos:
He (Himes) talked about God not as a noun but as a verb – the fact that relationships are God and interactions and volunteering. We can’t blame God for all the
problems [in the world]. We are co-creators with him, so you can’t despair with
everything that is going on in the world – you have to help it, you have to
alleviate it.
In this explanation, one can see that Santos cited as the most engaging theological text a
reading from the Serve Program that offered a conception of religion in which individuals share a responsibility with God for helping others.
A third Serve participant, business major Matthew Muldoon, pointed to several readings from the Catholic Social Teachings that highlight the role of personal and social
responsibility in religion. According to Muldoon:
We were reading a little bit about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, and I guess the connection I have drawn is – I am not particularly religious
right now because of my upbringing. I have really objectified Catholicism: you
have to do X and Y to be a good Catholic or else you are damned to hell and all
that stuff. But what I think she teaches you is that you have to take away the main
points of Catholicism like compassion for all and not worry so much about those
other issues.
In this explanation, Muldoon focuses on Day’s message of compassion for the poor and
oppressed, and on the responsibility of more affluent citizens to provide support and
relief to struggling fellow citizens.
On a similar note, communications major Cecelia Sullivan explained that the
assigned theological readings which most engaged her were portions of the New
Testament. According to Sullivan, “I have enjoyed reading the Bible [in my Serve
class] . . . It gave me more sort of a humanitarian message about my religion.” Noting
that Matthew 25 in the New Testament specifically calls for Christians to provide food
and clothing for the poor, Sullivan added that, prior to Serve, “I never realized that there
is such an obligation to help [the poor] in that I am not being a true Christian if I am
not.” Finally, communications major Selena Rambaud explained that, to her surprise,
she experienced similar feelings of engagement while studying assigned portions of the
Bhagavad Gita. According to Rambaud, “One of the [Hindu] gods, Krishna, says that
the only way to be happy in life is if you are working for someone else, if you are not
being greedy, and that is the only way to fulfill or find perfection.” Rambaud admitted
that she initially had her doubts about the value of studying this Hindu text. In her
words, “It didn’t seem that interesting to me [because] I don’t know anything about
Hindu culture, but now that we are reading it . . . [I see how] it applies to the world
today.” She, too, gravitated towards the portions of the text focused on individual and
social responsibility.
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For fully half of the students who participated in qualitative interviews, the themes
within their assigned theological texts which resonated most strongly were those that
spoke to their responsibilities as individuals and as members of a larger society for the
wellbeing of individuals struggling with poverty and oppression. We contend that this
resonance is due, in large part, to the heightened awareness of poverty and inequality
that students acquired through experiences at their service placements. In considering
this interaction between the service placements and assigned theological readings, we
draw upon the extant scholarship on community service learning, identity development
and emerging adulthood, and also consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of such
an interaction.
Discussion
This study of the Serve Program at Ignatius University found that, on average, participating Serve students emerged from the experience with a deeper interest in theology
than their Ignatius University classmates who had not participated in the program.
Moreover, these students completed the Serve Program with a deeper interest in pursuing coursework in theology than they had expressed at the beginning of the academic
year. Finally, the students who felt they had been most powerfully impacted by the
Serve Program were also the students most likely to express a heightened interest in
theology and in pursuing additional theology coursework. All of these findings suggest
that the Serve Program had a positive effect upon participating students’ interest in and
engagement with the discipline of theology.
An important question, then, is how the Serve Program deepened participating
students’ interest in theology. As previously noted, the answer to this question seems
to be two-fold. First, interviews with Serve participants revealed that the program’s
field-based community service placements heightened participating students’ awareness
of poverty and inequality by giving them opportunities to witness firsthand the causes
and consequences of these social ills. Second, this heightened awareness of poverty
and inequality impacted the lens through which Serve participants read and reflected
upon the program’s assigned theological texts. Specifically, Serve participants read
and reflected upon theological texts such as Himes’s Doing the Truth in Love, Nolan’s
Jesus Before Christianity, and Day’s From Rome to Union Square with a particular
eye towards these authors’ messages about individual and social responsibility
towards the poor.
Recall, for example, that Serve participant Felicia Santos described her most significant takeaway from Himes’s Doing the Truth in Love as the realization that “We can’t
blame God for all the problems [in the world] . . . You have to help it, you have to alleviate it.” Likewise, in her description of the key themes in From Rome to Union Square,
Lori Clarke described activist Dorothy Day as “seeing God” in the poor men and
women on whose behalf she worked and, as a result, feeling “drawn to help [them].”
On a similar note, Selena Rambaud characterized her primary takeaway from studying
the Bhagavad Gita as the revelation that “the only way to be happy in life is if you are
working for someone else.”
In short, our contention is that the Serve Program raised participating students’
awareness of poverty and inequality through firsthand experiences at their respective
service placements, and, in so doing, led these students to turn towards the program’s
assigned theological readings with a particular eye towards these writers’ perspectives
on social responsibility for the poor and downtrodden. Having witnessed firsthand
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through their service placements some of the causes and consequences of poverty,
many Serve participants experienced a newfound investment in reflecting upon their
responsibility as individuals and as members of a broader community for addressing the
needs of individuals contending with poverty. The Serve Program’s assigned theological
readings provided a valuable mechanism for such reflection.
As for why the experiences of Serve participants at their community service placements so powerfully impacted their reading of the program’s assigned theological
texts, recall from the literature review the extant scholarship from developmental
psychology on community service learning and identity development. Namely, emerging adult scholar Jeffrey Arnett characterizes the college years as the period in the
lifespan in which individuals are most actively seeking out new ideologies and perspectives to inform their understanding of the world and their role in it (2000, 2004).
Moreover, psychologist James Youniss cites community service learning experiences
during these years as a key mechanism for such identity exploration because community service learning can introduce college students to individuals – both the recipients
of the service and the professionals organizing the service experiences – with very
different perspectives and life experiences than that of their parents and teachers
(Youniss et al. 1997, Youniss 1999). Moreover, the organizations through which
students are carrying out their service-work likely approach this work with “explicit
ideological orientations” that participating college students can observe, consider,
reflect upon, and ultimately either reject or build into their own value systems
(Youniss and Yates 1997, 623).
To what kinds of “explicit ideological orientations” were students in the Serve
Program exposed? Certainly, there are significant variations across the more than
fifty different service placements through which Serve participants engage in service.
However, because each placement focuses on alleviating poverty (albeit in very different
ways), the majority of students are exposed to organizations which conceptualize their
clients’ poverty as an injustice and their neglect by the broader society as immoral.
For example, one of the participating service organizations which provides a variety
of services to refugees and immigrants characterizes its mission as “serving a diverse
population of refugees and immigrants” and, in so doing, “working towards
the building of a just and compassionate society rooted in the dignity of all people.”
A second organization seeks to close the achievement gap in underfunded urban public
schools and characterizes its mission as “promoting racial justice and equity by challenging systemic racism and acting as a catalyst for antiracist learning and action.”
A third organization, which operates a soup kitchen for homeless men and women,
characterizes its dual mission as “to minister to the needs of society’s forgotten people
[and] to challenge and offer alternatives to the attitudes, institutions, and structures that
create and perpetuate suffering and violence.”
As is evident in each of the above mission statements, many Serve participants
engaged in service through organizations that conceptualize their clients’ struggles
as evidence of society’s abdication of responsibility for its most vulnerable citizens.
Perhaps it should not be surprising then that the college students participating in the
Serve Program, and engaging with these organizations for ten to twelve hours each
week, began reflecting upon their responsibilities as individuals and as members of
a broader community for the wellbeing of fellow citizens contending with poverty.
Nor should it be surprising that these students turned to the Serve Program’s
assigned theological readings as a vehicle for reflecting upon the size and scope
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of such responsibilities; the Serve Program explicitly aspires to “help students make
relevant connections between course material and [their] experience with community
service.”
One mechanism within the Serve Program that facilitates students’ ability to draw
these connections is the program’s weekly discussion section. Recall that in addition
to the Serve Program’s thrice-weekly lectures and ten to twelve hours of service, all
students participate in a weekly discussion section with twelve to fifteen classmates in
which they have an opportunity to reflect together upon their course readings and community service experiences. While one might expect students to resent this additional
demand upon their time, we reported in a previous paper that a majority of Serve
participants actually characterize their weekly discussion sections as “essential to the
Serve Program,” “a totally necessary part of class,” and “the place where you are actually getting into the real issues” (Seider et al. 2009, 3). From these and other comments,
it would seem that Serve participants recognize that the issues to which they are
exposed through their service placements and assigned readings are both complex
and inter-related, and they welcome a venue for thinking through these issues with
classmates and a Serve faculty member.
Questions for Consideration
In this study’s literature review, several of the religion and theology scholars who
described the use of community service learning in their own courses characterized the
service component of these courses as offering “another text for class” (Batten 2005,
111). However, our contention in the preceding paragraphs has been that the community
service placements embedded in the Serve Program serve not just as another text for
participating students but, rather, as a lens which influences students’ interpretations of
the Program’s actual assigned theological texts. We make this claim, in part, because
theological texts such as From Rome to Union Square, the Bhagavad Gita, and Jesus
Before Christianity take on a wide range of topics and themes; however, when asked
which aspects of these texts had most engaged them, half of the Serve participants
pointed directly to the portions of these works focused on personal and social responsibility. As emerging adults who had been recently exposed through their service placements to ideologies which held members of a community to be responsible for the
wellbeing of fellow citizens, they were eager to utilize the Serve Program’s theological
texts as tools for reflecting upon this perspective and for subsequently making relevant
adaptations to their existing worldviews.
Several important questions emerge from such a contention. For example, would
such engagement in community service yield an equally powerful influence upon participating students’ interpretation of any type of text – psychology, sociology, political
science, and so forth – or is there a particularly powerful interaction between fieldbased community service and readings in theology and religion? While at this time an
answer to this question can only be speculative, recall that psychologist James Youniss
also characterized community service learning as a powerful mechanism for identity
development during emerging adulthood because of its ability to encourage reflection
on moral questions (Yates and Youniss 1996). It would seem, then, that community
service learning experiences align particularly well with academic study of religion
and theology (as well as philosophy) because it is these disciplines which most
directly take on fundamental questions about what it means to live morally and
ethically.
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The irony of this powerful alignment between community service learning and the
disciplines of religion and theology is that, as noted earlier in this paper, community
service learning is widely used in the social sciences and in pre-professional studies,
but is currently underutilized in the humanities. One would hope that the powerful
interaction between field-based service and theological study described in this study of
the Serve Program would lead more scholars in the humanities – and in departments of
religion and theology, in particular – to consider community service learning as a highly
relevant pedagogical strategy.
Another important question raised by this study is whether there are any disadvantages to what we have described as the powerful impact of the Serve Program’s service
placements upon participating students’ reading of their assigned theological texts.
For example, we noted that, when asked to describe their primary takeaways from the
assigned theological readings, many Serve participants focused exclusively upon the
themes of personal and social responsibility embedded within these texts. We have
asserted that this focus was due, in large part, to Serve participants utilizing these theological texts as a mechanism for reflecting upon the social justice ideologies to which
they were exposed through their respective service placements. Such an intense focus
upon the theme of social responsibility within the Serve Program’s assigned theological
readings aligns well with the learning objectives of the Serve Program – a program
whose mission “is to educate our students about social injustice . . . and enable students
to question conventional wisdom and work for a just society.” However, it seems reasonable to surmise that one byproduct of such an intense (and singular) focus upon the
theme of social responsibility may have been the program’s ineffectiveness at influencing participating students’ interest in conventional religious practice (for example, participating in church or religious organizations, discussing religion with family friends,
or integrating spirituality into their lives).
Recall from the results of this study that although participation in the Serve
Program significantly increased participating students’ interest in theology and desire
to take additional theology coursework, the Serve Program did not have a significant
effect upon participating students in terms of these conventional measures of religious
engagement. It would seem that the field-based community service embedded in the
Serve Program resulted in participating students becoming focused on the social justice
themes embedded in the program’s assigned theological texts to the exclusion of other
themes related to religious practice. One can see this pattern play out in the explanation by Serve participant Matthew Muldoon that his primary takeaway from reading
Dorothy Day’s From Union Square to Rome was that “you have to take away the
main points of Catholicism like compassion for all and not worry so much about those
other issues.” For Muldoon, those “other issues” may well have included traditional
religious practices such as attending church or seeking to integrate spirituality into
his life.
Again, this focus by Muldoon and other Serve participants upon the social justice
themes embedded in Day’s writing align well with the learning objectives of the Serve
Program; however, it also seems reasonable to characterize Muldoon as having misread
Dorothy Day in his description of Day as focusing on “compassion for all” and “not
worry[ing] so much about those other [religious] issues.” Certainly Day’s work and life
were a testament to her compassion for the poor and oppressed, but she was also a
devout (if unconventional) Catholic for whom religious practices such as the baptism
of her daughter were tremendously significant. While one can reasonably draw the
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conclusion from this study that community service learning is a powerful pedagogical
strategy for increasing participating college students’ interest and engagement in theology and religious courses, both this study’s survey data and interview data suggest that
a potential hazard in pairing community service and theological study may be a singular
focus upon the themes in assigned readings that align neatly with the issues raised at the
accompanying service placements. Such a possibility raises additional questions. How
might Serve participants have read the assigned theological texts differently if the fieldbased service experiences had focused on a social issue other than poverty? How might
the lenses of Serve participants been influenced by engaging in service with organizations that espoused ideologies of philanthropy or charity rather than social justice?
How might students engaged in theological study and community service on a secular
campus respond differently to a program such as the Serve Program? These and other
questions go beyond the scope of the present study but point to the need for additional
research into the effects of community service learning upon college students’ engagement with coursework in religion and theology.
Conclusion
In this study we sought to use the Serve Program at Ignatius University to demonstrate
that combining coursework in theology with field-based community service has a positive effect upon participating college students’ interest and engagement with theology
as well as their recognition of theology’s relevance to the “real world.” By offering
students a participatory experience with a service organization and the individuals
connected to it, a field-based community service experience exposes participating
college students to new ideologies and perspectives that can inform their growing understanding of the world. Students may then turn to their assigned theological texts as a
tool for reflecting upon these newfound ideologies and perspectives and, in so doing,
develop a deeper appreciation of the value of theology for considering important moral
and ethical questions. Certainly this study is exploratory in that we were only able to
investigate students’ self-reported engagement in theology and interest in pursuing additional theology coursework. A useful follow-up study would consider how many Serve
participants actually go on to engage in additional theology coursework in subsequent
semesters at Ignatius University, choose majors and minors in theology, and subsequently pursue theological and religious studies in graduate school. Nonetheless, while
community service learning has long played a role at the university level in the social
sciences and in pre-professional majors such as business and education, we are hopeful
that this investigation of the Serve Program at Ignatius University will serve to highlight
the powerful role that community service learning has to play in humanistic disciplines
such as theology and religion.
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