Scott Noble, a Tulane College freshman from Post Falls, Idaho, who does service learning at Hoffman Elementary.

Learning in the Real World

By Mary Ann Travis
Photography by Jackson Hill

Summer camp, 1997--Soft-spoken and serious, Barbara Moely is doing something that she, as an academic researcher, had never imagined herself doing: She is running a summer camp.

But this summer camp is not situated on the shore of an idyllic lake where campers swim and row and sail to their hearts' content, forming friendships and singing songs around a campfire.

Woodson Summer Camp, on the Tulane campus, is a reading camp for 75 students from Woodson Middle School, one of Orleans Parish Public Schools' most disadvantaged. The Woodson summer campers do not have perfectly matched shorts and tops and extra bathing suits with their names embroidered on labels sewn in the clothing by their mothers.

The Woodson campers, who mostly live in the Guste or C.J. Peete public housing residences, come from households with an average annual income of $6,000.

At Woodson camp that summer, Moely, a Tulane professor of psychology, did "service learning" for the first time. As part of the Adolescent Psychology course she taught for Tulane Summer School, she gave her college students the opportunity to work in the camp, tutoring the Woodson students as well as doing other camp activities. In addition to their traditional coursework, the service-learning college students had to keep a journal about the camp experience, reflecting on their observations of the middle-schoolers. In the journals, they related these observations to the adolescent-development theories Moely had presented in class lectures and assigned readings.

For the students who chose to do service learning, Moely could see the academic course come to life, and the experience convinced her that college students have much to gain from service learning. "It's a natural thing to be involved with real-life children as you're learning about them," she says.

"I felt the college students grew from it in many ways because they got a chance to try out their own talents and skills," she says. Students interested in theater, for example, did drama activities at the camp--"making up commercials or telling stories of the neighborhood or acting out things they were reading." Others did music or art activities.

"It was an opportunity for our students to do something beyond the minimum that they would do for a college course," says Moely. And in moving outside the lecture hall, Moely believes, the students consolidated the concepts they were acquiring in the course.

The experience also had a deep impact on Moely herself. As she notes three years--and a world of community contact--later, "It really changed my life."

C.J. Peete Homes, 1996--Some 1,400 apartments make up the public housing residences known as C.J. Peete, nestled in the heart of uptown New Orleans a mere 10 or 15 blocks--give or take a few light years--from the Tulane University campus. Barbara Moely and a number of her faculty colleagues at Tulane and Xavier are about to begin a journey into community awareness as they work with the Peete residents and the city in a unique university program known as CAP.

Like most of her colleagues, Moely, who has been a faculty member at Tulane since 1972, is focused on "straight research." A developmental psychologist, she investigates how children change developmentally. Cognitive ability stuff. If you teach children something, what do they actually learn? She looks into attitudes about school achievement, self-concept, motivation--all sorts of things that might predict success in school. She has an interest and concern about the application of the knowledge she's gained from her research. But she isn't a hands-on practitioner.

Then along came the Tulane-Xavier Campus Affiliates Program. In 1996, through the efforts of Gene D'Amour, vice president for institutional program development and government agency affairs, and others, Tulane and Xavier universities jointly received a five-year, $10-million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for CAP. (CAP is now part of the Tulane/Xavier National Center for the Urban Community, directed by Larry Powell, professor of history.)

CAP's aim is to apply the universities' resources toward improving the lives of impoverished families in New Orleans. CAP activities particularly center on the C.J. Peete housing development. Favrot Professor of Human Relations and sociologist Jim Wright headed up CAP in the beginning, and he asked Moely to join the group of faculty members involved in the initial planning.

"We'd have meetings every Wednesday down at the community center," Moely says. "Up to 30 people talking about children, families and education."

It was a whole different approach in that the academics listened to the community leaders about their needs and goals rather than telling the community what to do. Assistant professors of psychology Stacy Overstreet, Margaret Dempsey and Michael Cunningham were among the faculty members who worked with community representatives to learn about the area and plan programs.

Through her involvement with CAP, Moely made contacts in the C.J. Peete community, at Woodson Middle School and in other parts of the city.

And, thus, from CAP activities, service learning at Tulane was born.

"The approach of collaborating with the community continues in service learning today at Tulane," says Moely. "Community sites take the lead in developing plans for service learning and orienting students who will work with them."

Service learning is a methodology that's hovered around universities since the 1960s. It involves engaging university students in community service, but is different from simple volunteer work. In service learning, community activity is tied to academic coursework.

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