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| Lieutenant-Governor James K. Bartleman presents award to student Alexa DeGagné (above) and to Professor Linda Manning(below). | |
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Since its inception in September 2004, the University of Ottawa CSL program has placed more than 1,000 students in volunteer assignments with more than 50 non-profit community groups to undertake assignments reflecting and enhancing their class-based work.
Some of the program participants joined a symposium on March 30 to discuss their experiences and learn about the impact of CSL on research, social and political values.
Also attending was Ontario’s Lieutenant-Governor James K. Bartleman, who presented the 2005 Community Service Learning Participant of the Year Award to Professor Linda Manning and fourth-year political science student, Alexa DeGagné.
Manning used the CSL approach in a second-year social science course on economic development that she taught this year.
About 40 of the 170 students in the course worked with NGOs and reported on their experience at least once each week during the semester through a blog set up for that purpose. “I’ve always struggled to get students to better understand the importance of economics in their own lives,” Manning said. The CSL component provided “powerful experiential learning,” she said, so that students came back to the classroom with a much better grasp of concepts.
Student Alexa DeGagné, who worked at the Women’s Resource Centre on campus as part of a course on feminist theory, said that the experience “definitely opened my eyes to the reality of women’s groups.” She will use what she learned this year at the University of Alberta, where, this fall, she will begin working on a master’s thesis about women’s movements in Canada.
