FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR CASE STUDY
Dr Edward Zlotkowski
Professors Adler and Cage are both strong proponents of service-learning, and played an
important role in convincing the university at which they teach to develop a service scholarship
program for students whose high school community service contributions – as well as the
students’ academic work – have been distinguished. Several years after that program’s founding,
the university decided to launch a new 3-credit first-year seminar organized around topics of
faculty members’ own choosing. Adler and Cage applied to co-teach such a seminar on the topic
of social change. When their application was approved, they worked with the registrar’s office to
identify not only those incoming students who had been awarded service scholarships but also
other students with unusually strong service records. They then wrote to these students inviting
them to enroll in the new Social Change seminar. They explained that the course would have a
major service-learning component and would seek to link theory and practice in an exciting way.
Almost immediately the seminar filled.
Adler and Cage devoted many hours to designing their “dream” course. They could hardly
believe their good fortune in having a class of 18 students, all of whom had a demonstrated
interest in community-based work. Here was a chance to help committed, gifted students from
the very beginning of their college careers acquire a theoretical sophistication and historical
awareness that could bring their community work to a new level of effectiveness. By beginning
the course with an examination of theories of social change, the instructors would not only give
the students a chance to unpack the many dimensions of community engagement, they would also
embed the students’ own subsequent community activities in a rigorous academic context. In this
way the instructors would accomplish one of the first-year seminar’s most cherished goals:
namely, to introduce students to critical thinking and the conventions of academic analysis.
The first week seemed to go well, but by the end of the second week, one might already have
begun to sense that something was wrong. Several students failed to keep up with the reading
assignments and those that did seemed to do so without enthusiasm. The short reflective papers
intended to help students begin to re-conceptualize past community experiences were for the most
part uninspired if not superficial. Students did not seem to welcome questions or respond to
suggestions regarding their past community experiences. Soon attendance grew spottier, and inclass discussion became more or less invariably flat. Perhaps most surprising, when the students
were assigned the task of finding their semester community placement by talking to agency
representatives at the university’s fall volunteer fair, a majority of the students failed either to go
or to identify a placement.
Finally, one of the most articulate and conscientious students in the class confided to one of the
professors that she was leaning towards dropping the course. Adler and Cage now realized they
had to do something drastic. Pleading with the student who wanted to drop to wait just one more
week, they scrapped the planned syllabus and instead devoted two full class sessions to
processing student complaints and suggestions.
With a few of your peers, identify what you think the two instructors heard. How do you think
the students explained their failure to respond to the various assignments? Do you think at this
point Adler and Cage could still salvage the course? If so, how?