Service, learning combine at Cal State San Marcos

By: COLLEEN MENSCHING - North County Times | Saturday, January 12, 2008 8:30 PM PST ∞

Ana Manriquez walked into Oak Glen High School expecting thugs.

But what the Cal State San Marcos senior found was compelling enough for her to continue her volunteer work at the Valley Center-based continuation school beyond her initial commitment as part of the university's Community Service Learning program.

"I just fell in love with these kids," said Manriquez, whose major is human development. "I feel they are so misunderstood and need so much more attention. .... I thought they were troublemakers, but they are really just troubled kids."

The program promotes connections between community service and course curriculum, and student reflection on the meaning of service. While traditional internships may focus heavily on an academic experience for a student, service learning projects are intended to emphasize how the endeavor benefits both students and the organizations with which they volunteer.

But service learning can and should go further than that, according to sociology professor Mary Roche.

"We need to be moving beyond a charity framework and into a justice framework," she said. "Our goal is to help students be personal and political. It's really where the rubber meets the road in sociology."

Roche said for one student, that meant seeing parallels between the Humane Society's treatment of certain animals and human society's treatment of certain people.

Even at the "no kill" shelter the student worked at, pit bull terriers - a canine breed widely perceived as highly aggressive - were quickly euthanized.

"Some animals are not treated in the way that other animals are," Roche said. "(The student) did a great job of relating that to humans as well, how they are treated based on how they look, where they come from and what they do."

Darci Strother, director of community service learning, said the program was already in place when she arrived in 1993, just three years after the university's founding.

"It really is going to become a part of who we are as a campus, and it's becoming more and more part of the expectation."

As the university grows - it has 9,000 students now and is expected to reach 20,000 by 2020 - the service learning program grows too, and is getting some recognition.

In 2006, the program was one of 492 to make the president's first High Education Community Service Honor Roll. Cal State San Marcos served "with distinction," one of 141 schools to do so.

And last year, the Cal State San Marcos program was selected for inclusion in "Beyond the Books: Guide to Service-Learning Colleges and Universities." According to the publisher's Web site, the guide profiles "the most engaged institutions" for students, parents and high school counselors.

The program has not gone unnoticed on its own campus either. Professor Pamela Redela will soon incorporate service learning into her Women's Studies 101 course.

In other years, Redela required her students to interview a community activist as part of their course work. Ninety percent of them told her they wished they had become more involved in service activism during the class, she said.

Redela said service learning is a new phenomenon in education, one that she didn't experience as a student but that makes sense.

"It's a way to put the theories we talk about in the classroom into practice," Redela said. "It's just a good bridge for learning."

Because she teaches women's studies, she is looking to partner students with organizations that address some of the same concerns as feminism, including sexuality, class, equitable families and women in the work force.

One of those organizations may be Fraternity House Inc., the county's only licensed residential care facility for men and women with HIV/AIDS.

"Over the past few years, we've had more students than ever, so many of them," said Sara Garcia of Fraternity House. "They can help cook a meal for the residents or they can take them out shopping. They can sit and talk with them, just kind of be their friend.

"They're always willing to do just about whatever we ask them."

Strother said partnerships such as the one with Fraternity House are crucial to the success of community service learning.

More than 150 organizations have worked with Cal State San Marcos students, Strother said, in a process that embodies one of the university's five strategic goals: building community partnerships to help develop and enhance North County.

Contact staff writer Colleen Mensching at (760) 739-6675 or cmensching@nctimes.com.