Below are the personal reflections of the creators of this site. To find out more about them, check out the "About" page. These reflections show insight into CSL while it is in progress, as opposed to assumptions going in or impressions after the experience is over.
KassyAs a student in Communications 463 (Advanced Professional and Technical Communications) taught by Dr. Tania Smith, my initial expectations going into the class were much the same as in my other classes. That is, I expected a heavy workload; I expected to have numerous assignments, time constraints and scheduling differences within teamwork. Working part time, I expect to feel stressed out with the additional pressure of school assignments and exams. However, within this class I faced challenges that went beyond class assignments and exams. I found myself leaving class and struggling with my own emotions and frustrations about the workload, time and technology constraints, team communication, research, etc.
Often students may feel somewhat detached from their classes, floating through the semester writing the necessary assignments and tests, but never becoming fully aware of what that class has taught them. I know that I’m much like this, and this is where my struggle was within COMS 463. I simply was not able to become detached. Instead I struggled because I was becoming personally invested and involved within the class. My personal attachment to the assignments frustrated me beyond my own comprehension and I felt vulnerable and exposed for the first time in my academic career.
You may be wondering why being personally connected to a class would be frustrating. Let me explain. For me, COMS 463 was my first introduction to community service-learning (CSL) and I can compare the experience to falling in love for the first time. On the outside, before entering into it, you think that it is going to be a fairytale. Then you get into it, and in the spirit of embracing this newfound experience, you let your guard down and expose your true feelings and show your heart, thinking you will not get hurt. But most inevitably, CSL, like love, is not all roses. By letting your guard down you establish a personal connection, and when things do not go as smoothly as you like, you become overly sensitive and get hurt. Often, you want to walk away and break things off, thinking that would be the easy way out. Then, after cooling down, you realize that you have too much personally invested in the relationship to just ‘give up’. So you stick, and there are more bumps. But, in the end, it is worth it because you found something that is able to take a piece of you with it, that you are able to let your guard down with.
In a sense, I fell in love with CSL. I put a lot of detail and personality into my assignments, be it the blogs, the journalistic interviews, or the final website itself. I let my guard down and put a level of trust into this experience that went beyond a good grade or a course requirement. I struggled with this, feeling vulnerable the entire time. However, I came to realize that my vulnerability within CSL helped me realize a few things about my own skills.
I realized that I not only enjoyed writing, but I was good at it. I realized that by letting my guard down and putting my heart into something, I would be a little nervous about getting feedback and perhaps sometimes a little offended, but that that feedback could lead to amazing results. By being vulnerable I could increase the detail in my work that I had never before achieved. Most importantly I have realized that by establishing a personal connection to something, I have much more pride in the results than by remaining detached throughout the process.
Obviously this transformation did not involve just myself. CSL, like falling in love, requires friends to be there when the going gets tough. To talk you through it and to provide some insight that you yourself may not have seen, especially when you are stubbornly holding onto your own opinions. I am stubborn in nature and without the insight and opinions of my teammates, as well as Dr. Smith and Carmen, I would have most likely been forever stuck in a lovers quarrel with CSL. Thanks to their help, I budged, and I grudgingly admitted that my ideas were not always the right ones. I moved forward, and the end result has never felt so good.
 ChanakyaWhen I enrolled in COMS 463 this winter I had just finished a course on rhetoric and was seeking to build on it with advance theories regarding technical and professional rhetoric. As I understood it, this would provide me with the necessary knowledge to make effective and efficient communication in my professional career, helping me become a productive employee of whatever organization I will eventually work for.
Through this course I gained new tools to critically view and even construct online communication. The course also provided me with an understanding of ethical concerns while constructing professional communication. Thus my initial concerns for this course have been met and I feel satisfied with the theoretical knowledge I have gained. Throughout the course I have also experienced certain aspects of communication that I had not ventured into or had the opportunity to explore before. These were creating a blog, making a website, conducting interviews and reporting them in journalistic articles. I enjoyed all of these experiences but especially found the experience of conducting interviews and reporting them very interesting. However this mostly enjoyable experience has been confounded by one aspect of the course that I had never heard of before: service-learning. At first CSL seemed like an interesting if not a noble idea, of constructing communication that would serve the community through co-operation with peers, faculty and community partners. Though as interesting the idea seemed the more difficult and complex the work turned out to be. It involved time being devoted towards significant research, meeting more than just the standard of our professor, being accountable for not only my work but also for my team, and the aspect of constructing useable and fruitful articles meant to have a future not just papers meant to be deposited at the end of the semester. Another troubling aspect was the multiple stages with different micro goals we had to undergo for our project. I believe this caused us to loose sight of our overriding goal behind our final project. About mid-way of the semester me and my group felt lost about our goal and briefly had to struggle to get hold of our logic behind our final website. CSL was definitely not the easiest experience I have had. And I would like to thank my team for supporting me when the going got rough. However through these hurdles I found the inspiration for constructing my articles. I set my goal to better inform readers about what is involved in CSL, its good and bad aspects, so that they could do a cost-benefit analysis of it (you could tell I have an Econ majors). Thus my over-riding concern while constructing my articles was for students to have accessible content to better prepare themselves and form the necessary resolve as they embark on CSL projects similar to ours. Amy The class required a lot of work, both individually and as a group, and I don't think I am alone in saying that it was hard to handle. The structure of the class, being so different from a traditional class also make it diffucult, and though the difficutlies lessened over time, it was still hard to adapt and change my learning style, despite the fact that I have taken CSL classes before.
When it came time to actually start working on the first assignment I was wondering why we needed to write a blog, even knowing the nature of the class. The blog was a starting point, but it was a frustrating assingment for me. Going over all of the material from a previous course was tedious, though learning how to edit was useful. However, when my low grade came back from the blog I was not at all surprised. I found it to be a difficult assignment, and since I was still questioning its usefulness there was a lack of effort on my part.
The creation of a website made more sense to me. I was willing to work harder, to conduct interviews to find out student's point of views on CSL because it seemed to match what I expected of the class. My willingness showed, just like my frustration showed with the blogs. The websites that we created in this class made me appreciate what we were learning. The websites were a new experience, one that I think will be beneficial to me as I am finishing up my last semester at the university and getting ready to enter the real world.
Having a group to work with made this class a little easier for me. We were able to discuss our issues with the assignments, talk about the positives of our work, come up with ideas to make everything just a little bit better. I enjoyed working with the people I had in my group, and though we were not perfect in everything we did, it made everything just a little bit better.
MaryannePrior to this class I had never taken a Community Service Learning Class. Prior to this class I had never even heard of Community Service Learning Course. Having started the class two weeks late, thanks to a variety of reasons, I felt behind from day 1 (or is that day 14)? Either way being immersed in a class that was much more involved than any I had previously taken I was quite worried. Before starting the class our professor, Dr. Tania Smith, had tried to explain what service learning is and how involved it becomes. While I understood that there would be a lot of work I wasn't worried because university is a lot of work. It wasn't until I started classes and was preparing my first assignment – a blog based on previous CSL student’s course work and/or reflections – that I really started to realize just how different a CSL course is. There is no clear cut way to approach the class. It is a bit of a trial and error process, there are general guidelines and rules to follow but there is so much scope for the imagination of where you want to go with the projects. Having this scope inspires ideas of grandeur but it makes it hard to complete everything in the limited amount of time available during the semester. I read a few articles by Breanna Fitzpatrick and she mentioned in one of her reflections that a traditional course is like a fast food meal. It is pre packaged, neat and tidy and the same for everyone. I love baking and cooking so I latched on to this metaphor, if a traditional class is like fast food then a CSL class is like a home cooked meal. A home cooked meal is never the same twice, just as no two students are exactly alike or learn the same way. Each experience, both good and bad, is unique to the individuals. It can be a messy process; there are often many things all happening at the same time and it can be overwhelming, especially when you are trying to satisfy not only yourself but also the teacher and community partners. Even though the instructions can be confusing and it gets messy there is something wonderful about finishing cooking a meal and taking pride in what you have accomplished, and seeing other people enjoy the fruits of your labour. My journey with CSL has not been all sunshine and roses, there were times when I felt that there was too much to do, not enough time and that every sentence I wrote needed two sentences to explain it. However being part of a team and being able to connect to other people through their inherited documents has connected me to something larger than myself or this class. Knowing that your work could influence others who may take a CSL course down the road, or a website that may be used may be used by the community partners, has made me work harder and longer than for merely a grade. I will be sad to let this project go, after having put so much into it but the knowledge that it will benefit others makes it easier. So as I leave this class I realize that although I may move on, a part of me will stay here to help others who are experiencing CSL for the first time. NatashaWhat is CSL to me? When I first walked into this course, I felt a giddy excitement that accompanies any new venture into the unknown. Though I had taken a CSL course before, judging from the course outline, this course would be different. This course wasn’t taught by the book, it was taught through collaboration and trial and error, it was taught through “real” experiences. Wrapping up this course, my understandings of CSL have changed, but my enthusiasm hasn’t. I now know that CSL is hard and very out of my comfort zone, with ways of doing things that I have yet to fully understand, but then again, so is real life. What CSL taught me was how to apply my nearly finished communications degree fully in a way that surprised even me. I thought coming in that I knew what my capabilities were, but coming out I realized I was wrong, I was capable of much more than I had expected and it was uplifting to learn that the University courses I had taken had provided me with a wealth of internal resources for situations such as this.My journey through this CSL course was rocky but full of learning curbs and experiences. I am used to being subordinate to professors and doing what I am told to get the grade. In this course, we collaborated with the Dr. Smith and Carmen the CSL coach in a very informal way that I was not used to. It was difficult at first to let down my barriers because I was paranoid from years of doing it the other way that if I over-stepped my boundaries, I would be penalized. But I soon learned that our team’s best work could be done by picking Dr. Smith and Carmen’s brains for ideas and information and working with them to put forth the best work that we were capable of. This experience has helped me to grow academically by giving me a chance to apply my communications and rhetorical theory into a real situation in the form of a website to be used by a community partner. It has given me a means of expression through learning about blogging and how it has taught me how our words can endear even after we are finished the course. I also learned the value of collaboration between many partners and various effective methods to communicate using email, Google documents, and even websites. I learned how self-reflection and group reflections can really help a team’s progress. You can catch problems while they are happening and correct them, instead of looking back after everything is said and done and wishing you had done it differently. This also ties into the lesson of the importance of constructive feedback. This is like a second chance for a group to tweak the things that may not be going in the right direction and also a way to make sure that all partners are satisfied with the finished product. This is my last semester and having a CSL course to help end everything seems to make a lot of sense now, though it wasn’t originally intentional. I know for a fact, having been through a few internships that everything I learned in this course I will use out in the work world and in my future career. Hopefully, I will be a better contributor to my workplace and also to society by applying some of the things I learned in CSL to my everyday life. |
|
|
 |
Our Reflections |
