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Earlham Annual Report

Page history last edited by Earlham College 15 years, 8 months ago

 

 

BONNER SCHOLARS PROGRAM

ANNUAL REPORT 2007-08

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS

 

 

Implementation of Student Development: 


 

 

Each Bonner Scholar at Earlham attends a monthly All-Bonner Meeting and a monthly meeting with other members of his or her class.  In addition, every Bonner Scholar chooses three in-services or training and enrichment activities per semester related to  a service or career-enhancing skill or to one or more of the Bonner Common Commitments. 

      

All-Bonner meetings are typically facilitated by the senior intern and often include a brief community-building activity designed by the senior intern.  All-Bonner meetings almost always include a speaker.  Speakers addressed topics including homelessness and chemical dependency.  A member of the staff of the Friends Committee on national Legislation talked about ways to affect laws and policy, and the Wayne County Sheriff made a presentation.  Staff from community partner organizations are often asked to speak with the focus being on an educational topic within their field of expertise, not simply explaining the site they represent or making a pitch to recruit volunteers.  As a side benefit, though, students do sometimes click with a presenter or the issue they are discussing and subsequently begin exploring a new avenue for service.

      

Class meeting activities are designed to reflect progression within the Bonner developmental model.   First year students focus on learning about the Bonner program and models for service and orientation for the First Year Trip.  Second year students participate in community asset mapping, learn about and practice  consensus decision-making and learn about project development, implementation and evaluation.  Third year students learn about and practice leading reflection, discuss translating direct service into research and policy work, examine service within an international context and choose other class topics of interest.  Fourth year students explore leadership, research their service site’s structure (board of directors, history, funding) and focus in several meetings on vocational topics. 

 

In the past few years, we have successfully invited Earlham faculty and staff with expertise in specific areas to lead skills-based trainings on topics such as grant writing, CPR, event planning and public speaking.  This past year it was exciting to have students and community partners join in presenting in-services on handling the challenges of working with kids,  LGBTQ issues and human rights, and interacting with people with special needs.

   

First year Bonners were again required to participate in a weekly seminar during fall semester.  For the second year, the seminar was recognized as a one-credit class.  Students respond to weekly journal prompts which help them clarify service interests and goals and to develop the habit of reflection about service.  Supplemental readings and class activities introduce a theoretical framework for thinking about service.  This year students enjoyed the introduction of a weekly competitive quiz about Bonner guidelines and requirements with the team having the most accumulated points at the end of the semester winning small prizes.

   

Students spent time with the Jubilee Project of Hancock County, Tennessee for their First Year Trip.  Even though different students participate each year, traveling to the same site has advantages which become more evident with time.  Students were able to see projects completed by previous years’ Bonners such as painted quilt squares on barns throughout the county and visiting a newly-opened restaurant run by the Nature Conservancy which was a dirty building full of junk when Bonners helped clean it out two years ago.  The fence this year’s Bonners built around an educational garden at the elementary school will doubtless be pointed out next year as a symbol of Bonners’ ongoing involvement with this small community in a part of the U.S. that few of our students have ever visited.  Many Bonners mentioned the First Year Trip as a formative experience during their senior capstone presentations, and it is a common experience which binds Bonners across classes.

   

Sophomores from Earlham and DePauw met in Indianapolis for their Second Year Exchange.  They distributed leaflets advertising Habitat for Humanity’s Home Store in a low-income neighborhood near the store, followed by lunch and reflection at a nearby Quaker meetinghouse.  A student from Earlham led an icebreaker, and a student from DePauw led the service reflection.  Earlham’s second years used the River Stories exercise as their re-commitment activity.

  

 

                                                                                                                               New Bonners Gustavo and Will

                                        working on fence construction during their first year trip. 

 

Most of our third year students spend one semester with an off-campus program in locations including India, Mexico, France and New Zealand.  These programs offer unparalleled opportunities for learning, growth and insight.  At the same time, the absence of large numbers of third year students from campus each semester can make it difficult to discern a more traditional leadership trajectory.

  

Fourth year students therefore seem to particularly enjoy re-connecting with members of their Bonner class and taking on projects and leadership roles with a noticeably increased sense of maturity and self-confidence.  Each month two or three students make their Senior Capstone Presentations of Learning at the All-Bonner meeting.  Each presentation is as unique as the students making them, and many students have come up with very creative ways to convey what they have done and learned through the Bonner program.  Younger Bonners often mention these presentations as a means of ideas for service and generally as a source of inspiration.

  

Implementation of Community Partnerships: 


 

Staff of the Bonner program and the Service Learning & Career Development Center maintain regular communication with staff at community partner agencies.  When a new site expresses interest in engaging Bonner scholars and other Earlham students in their work, we schedule a time to visit the site in order to learn more about the organization and its needs and to discuss the different categories of students they might engage and what is required for each (i.e., Bonner Scholars, work study students, interns, volunteers and one-time or seasonal group projects).  If there is mutual agreement that the placement is appropriate for one or more categories of students, the site is asked to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the college.  This past year, we added one new site, Wayne County Vision, to the list of sites with whom we have agreements.

  

Each May and June SLCDC staff visit about half of our community partner sites.  These visits provide an opportunity for ongoing orientation and coaching of site staff.  Furthermore, because staff at nonprofits seem to change frequently, it may serve as an initial introduction and a way to provide direct information about Earlham’s expectations for the various categories of students whom may come to the agency.  The visit is also a chance to learn about successes from the past year and to hear about new projects the site may be undertaking.  Finally, in the visits we sometimes discuss whether the site can accommodate certain categories of students and can meet the requirements of each group  of students.  These discussions sometimes lead to changing the designation of the type(s) of students the site can accept.

  

Each spring we also send a mailing to each site asking for updated information for our printed directory of service opportunities and for information about the number of students and the numbers of hours served during the past school year.  Sites are also asked to sign a new Memorandum of Understanding every two years and to indicate their ability to accept work study students by signing a new Work Study Agreement each year.

  

In early August, Earlham’s Service Learning & Career Development Center hosts a luncheon for staff from all community partner sites.  We have begun asking someone from a different community partner agency each year to speak briefly about how they utilize and manage students at their site and the value of student involvement.  By deliberately choosing sites who effectively supervise students and understand the value of encouraging  students to grow and increase their level of responsibility at the site, we hope that there can be some peer-to-peer modeling among sites.  In addition to SLCDC staff probiding updates, we market the lunch as a networking opportunity for sites.

  

At the beginning of each semester, SLCDC and Student Activities jointly sponsor an Involvement Fair.  All community partners and student organizations are invited to reserve a table to display information and meet potential student volunteers, interns and workers.  These fairs are very popular with both students and service sites.

  

Last year we piloted a site coordinator model with the Boys and Girls Club which has two sites and regularly utilizes several Earlham Bonner scholars and work study students.  Club staff were very excited about having a student who would specifically help to recruit, orient, schedule and support other students coming to the site.  They understood that staff still had an important role to play in all of these areas but felt that students would get more attention from the student in this role than they were sometimes able to give.  Another side benefit has been a recognition that students should be treated as a part of the staff in terms of information shared, expectations, etc.  The model has been successful but has not been in existence long enough to be institutionalized at the Boys and Girls Club.  A new site coordinator has been identified for the coming year, and we hope to offer this model to a small number of other sites which regularly attract several Earlham students and which do not already have their own model for coordination in place.

 

Campus-wide Culture and Infrastructure: 


 

Earlham includes a service or internship component in virtually all of its two dozen off-campus study programs.  In addition, 13 majors and minors require an internship experience while 18 others optionally give credit for participation in an internship.

  

A number of Earlham faculty in departments ranging from chemistry, biology and computer science to psychology and Peace and Global Studies have individually, or in collaboration with colleagues from within their departments or divisions, created community-based research projects, required service in a course-related area to complement classroom learning and taught material that enhances students’ understanding of the communities they engage through service.  This past year, visits from Bonner Foundation staff in both fall and spring helped us draw together faculty from across departments and divisions.  We discovered interest in fostering more discussion and collaboration around inclusion of community engagement in the curriculum.  

 

The Earlham Volunteer Exchange (EVE) is a student-run clearinghouse that helps students find local volunteer opportunities.  EVE leaders and their faculty advisor (a member of the SLCDC staff) have been working more intentionally in the past year to identify specific goals and expanded activities for EVE.  Leaders of EVE and Bonner Scholars have expressed a desire to work more closely together and to collaborate in areas such as group service opportunities and training/educational workshops.

 

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