Periclean Scholars classes: academic service learning
When I explain the Periclean Scholars program to colleagues at other colleges and universities I emphasize that it is an academic program with service deeply woven into it. I go on to say that each Class of 33 (+/-) students chooses one or more issues in their assigned nation or region to address during their sophomore year, and then spends the next two years engaged in activities that integrate academic reading, research, and writing with service and outcome-oriented experiential learning activities.
One unique strength of the program is that each Class acts as a multi-year interdisciplinary seminar where students learn to use and to communicate to non-experts the theoretical and methodological tool-sets that they are learning in their majors while at the same time learning about the tool sets from the majors of their Classmates.
The academic courses that are taken as part of the program have been scrutinized and vetted by the University Curriculum Committee and are also up for regular review by outside accreditation entities with which Elon has an affiliation, most notably the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. These courses include COR 225, PER 271, 351,352, 451, and 452 and also COR 445, the winter term travel course that most of the Classes have taken. As academic courses each must include significant reading, research, and writing and, hence, have clear rubrics as to what is expected from the students.
A second strength of the program is that all Periclean Scholars classes operate as seminars, with heavy emphasis on student ownership and leadership in most aspects of the class. The student ownership of the Class has typically included actively participating in the construction of course syllabi, with this role taking on more prominence as the Class progresses from first to second and then to the third year of the program.
By the second and third year of the program the Classes function such that each is broken up into various work groups with various individual goals and benchmarks. In the first semester of Periclean all students read, research and write from common materials most frequently assigned by their Mentor. By the junior and senior year the reading, research and writing done by any individual student may be very different from his/her Classmates and there may be only one or two books and articles that everyone in the Class reads in common. The reading, research and writing done by each student is appropriate to her/his contribution to the Class and may frequently involve dimensions which bridge majors, perspectives and presentational formats.
The unique nature Periclean Scholars, i.e., it is a multi-year cohort based academic service learning program with diverse co-curricular and extracurricular components, creates challenges for establishing and communicating clear, consistent, and fair grading rubrics. Each Class and Mentor must face this challenge creatively and with a firm commitment to the highest academic standards. The expectation must be for each student in every Periclean Class to constantly be learning more about their country (or region) of focus and the issue(s) on which they have chosen to focus. The work for each Class and Mentor at the beginning of the semester is to determine the rubric or rubrics by which this work will be assessed.
With all of the above said, a third -and perhaps most important- strength of the program is that both students and Mentors are involved because they are honoring the fact that they have the high privilege of being Pericleans. The reward is ultimately intrinsic: we do what we do because we have a deep sense of social responsibility to and feel connected with our brothers and sisters around the world. We know in our hearts that to do anything less than our best is to sacrifice the gift of the positions we hold as faculty and students at Elon University and as Periclean Scholars.
Follow