Purdue News
Purdue News
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Serving to learnPERSPECTIVE – If John Pomery's approach to teaching leaves some of his colleagues and students scratching their heads, he figures he's doing his job. As Purdue's chief advocate for service learning courses, which combine class work with service in the community, he often challenges traditional thinking about what belongs in a college classroom. "Some students say, `Yes, it's good. But does it belong in a crowded curriculum?'" says Pomery, associate professor of economics.
Service learning also can be a tough sell to colleagues who believe in a more conventional, orthodox approach to curricula. "If you see everything as black and white, then the teacher's role is to download the black and white knowledge and the learner's role is to assim-ilate it and to reproduce it on exams," Pomery says. "In that view, service learning is simply community service and it doesn't belong in academics here." Clearly, Pomery sees it as a far more useful educational tool. He cites the Purdue Engineering Projects in Community Service, or EPICS program, as a good example of what service learning can do for both the student and the community. EPICS links engineers-in-training with community organizations that can use an engineer's problem-solving know-how. "They're learning about how their knowledge fits into society," Pomery says. Pomery says placing students in the community to apply what they learn in class to real-world situations usually presents the students with a whole new set of questions to grapple with and learn from. "One role of a teacher is to ask questions that force novel ways to view the world," he says. "I like trying to get students to answer awkward questions about things that they take for granted.
"Many of my students are at a point where they're ready to let go of the notion that they have all the answers. But they're afraid to let go of it."
That letting-go point often is the threshold to an epiphany. Pomery says he has watched his students experience these moments many times - often when a community service experience conveys a lesson that contradicts long-held beliefs. He says, for example, that undergraduate students typically enter his class with a long-standing belief about poverty: "That people tend to be poor only because of bad decisions or through some fault of their own." When Jason Klingaman took Economics 390, Pomery's "Learning Culture and Community" course, in the fall of 1998, the management student climbed into a van with his fellow students and went to low-income housing units in Indianapolis. The students helped economically disadvantaged children ages 6 through 11 with their homework and then spent time with them playing, talking and listening. "I found out things through this program that I never knew," says Klingaman, a senior from Columbia City, Ind. "There were parents who weren't interested in encouraging their kids in school. I heard stories about parents punishing kids for trying too hard to get good grades. "They didn't have things that I took for granted, like having basic needs met, like shelter and safety and having parents." Now one of the first four Service Learning Ambassadors for Purdue, Klingaman plans to work as an accountant when he graduates this December. He says he will always find some way to serve others. Pomery bristles as he points out that some might term him a "pie-in-the-sky do-gooder" - but he doesn't dwell on the possibility. He says his commitment to service and to service learning emerges from a faith-based personal integrity that "leaves a sense of duty to make the world a slightly better place."
Pomery serves in many unselfish roles including community service director for Purdue, chair of the University ad hoc Task Force on Citizenship Edu-cation and faculty adviser for the stu-dent chapter of Habitat for Humanity. He says he hopes to reach students who believe that they must focus only on themselves to succeed or assume they would be alone in thinking outwardly: "There are those who do nothing and assume everyone else does nothing. We hope to reach them." Pomery also says that he believes that the University's sense of duty to community is likely to continue to grow under the leadership of President Martin Jischke. He points to Jischke's role as chair of the Kellogg Commission committee that produced the report "Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution" in February 1999. In the report, the commission stated that "one of the best ways to prepare students for the challenges life will place before them lies in integrating the community with the academic experiences. "Service learning opportunities undoubtedly help everyone involved - student, community and institution." More information on service learning is online. Serving is key componentService learning is not new at Purdue. In 1998, the University's ad hoc Task Force on Citizenship Education inventoried service learning classes. The survey found that service outside the University had been a key component in most schools' curricula for many years. Depending on the semester, Purdue students can choose from about 70 different courses that offer service learning opportunities. A small number of examples: PHOTO CAPTION: Amit Jain of Glenrock, N.J., a Purdue senior majoring in economics, tutors a group of elementary students from the Indianapolis Public Schools. He does the work as part of a Purdue class that meets once a week at three public housing sites in Indianapolis.
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