Community Psychology Linking Individuals and Communities 3e Kloos Elizabeth Abraham Maurice Instructor manual with TestBank

Community Psychology Linking Individuals and Communities 3e Kloos Elizabeth Abraham Maurice Instructor manual with TestBank

Introduction and Overview

This instructor manual complements Community Psychology: Linking Individuals and Communities, 3^rd edition by Kloos, Hill, Thomas, Wandersman, Elias and Dalton. In writing the text and this manual, we seek to encourage students’ reflection, active questioning and discussion, application of community psychology concepts, and involvement in their communities. Many instructors and students consider our engaging pedagogy to be a distinctive strength of our textbook.

We intend for this Instructor’s Manual to be as useful as possible and intend to update it on a regular basis. If you have ideas or materials that you have found useful when teaching course in community psychology and would like to have them included in this manual, please contact one of the first three authors.

Bret Kloos

Department of Psychology

University of South Carolina

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

kloos@mailbox.sc.edu

Jean Hill

Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences

New Mexico Highlands University

Las Vegas, New Mexico 87701

jlhill@nmhu.edu

505-454-3562

Elizabeth Thomas

Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

University of Washington Bothell

Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE

Bothell, Washington 98012

ethomas@uwb.edu

425-352-3590

Using the Textbook and This Manual

We intend our textbook to be useful for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in psychology and related fields. We also seek to provide an overview of community psychology for community psychologists, citizens, and professionals in other fields. Finally, we seek to make conceptual contributions to community psychology, posing issues for scholars and activists in our field to consider, and adding to the ongoing conversation that is our field. This mix of aims is ambitious, yet you can choose elements of our content and pedagogy that fit your purposes and students.

Community psychology courses are taught at graduate and undergraduate levels, with enrollments from small seminars to large undergraduate courses. Instructors may be experienced hands looking for new ideas, or new to the role of college instructor. With that potential variety of audiences, we wrote this instructor manual and test bank to provide resources at a variety of levels, for a variety of instructional approaches. Not all of them will be appropriate for your course, and we encourage you to choose what matches your course objectives, teaching style, and students.

Resources in This Manual

The first section of this manual focuses on materials and suggestions related to the structure of the class as a whole. We include resources for examining the community psychology course syllabi of other instructors, a discussion of the role of service learning projects in community psychology classes, and suggestions for in-class and out-of-class assignments and course-long projects.

This manual contains chapters keyed to the textbook’s chapters. Chapters in this manual begin with a Chapter Outline. The second section, Suggestions for Discussion and Exercises, provides topics for discussion in small groups or as a class. Most of them can begin with individual reflection and writing, before class or in class. This can proceed to discussion of ideas, in pairs, small groups, or the entire class. Most rely on a summary discussion of ideas in a class discussion led by the instructor. Many of these were included under the heading Brief Exercises at the end of each chapter of the text of the 2^nd edition.

The first Exercise in Chapter 1 describes a format, developed by Maurice Elias, for students to write reflective reaction papers on textbook chapters. Students write about their Revelations or insights from the chapter, Emotions they experienced while reading or thinking about the chapter, Questions they have about the chapter or its topic, and Disagreements they may have with our perspective or content. Maurice and Jim use variations on this format in their classes, for at least some chapters. They find it valuable in understanding what students think and feel, and what they do and do not understand in the text. We encourage you to adapt the format to fit your course objectives.

This section also provides suggestions longer exercises and projects, which could conceivably last for most of a class meeting or be used as a course assignment. Some of these assignments were presented as Interchapter Exercises in the 2^nd edition of the book and were addressed to the students in the text, others were included as Appendices in 2^nd edition Instructor’s Manual, and others are new to this Instructor’s Manual. Our purposes are to provide extended exercises that integrate concepts from one or more chapters, and to provide resources for analysis and critique of further reading. Their directions are addressed directly to students, but of course you can modify them. For those of you who would like to locate specific assignments, here is a list of their titles and page numbers.

Assignment	IM Location (Chapter-Page)
Community-Based Learning and Community Psychology: Learning Through Experience (old Appendix D)	Intro-8 to Intro-13
In the Final Analysis: Students’ Reflections on Their Community Psychology Service-Learning Experiences (old Appendix E)	Intro-14 to Intro-18
Problem Definition Assignment (new)	1-4 to 1-5
Analyzing a Community Research Report (Interchapter Exercise Ch. 4)	4-5 to 4-6
Ecological Assessment of a Setting (Interchapter Exercise Ch. 5)	5-5 to 5-7
Discussing Affirmative Action (old Appendix B)	7-27 to 7-32
Mapping Your Social Support Network (old Interchapter Exercise Ch. 8)	8-3 to 8-6
Touring the Prevention/Promotion Literature (Interchapter Exercise Ch.9)	9-4 to 9-5
Specific Questions in Prevention and Promotion Program Development & Evaluation (new)	9-7 to 9-8
Force Field Analysis (old Appendix A)	10-4 to 10-13
Interactive Systems Framework Worksheet (new)	10-14 to 10-16
How to Write a Policy Brief (new)	12-4 to 12-5
Community Psychology Class Debate as a Review Exercise for the Course (new)	14-4 to 14-5

The next section, Lecture Enhancements, may include different types of material for each chapter. For many chapters, we have included Suggested Videos, with brief notes. We have striven for quality and relevance to the course rather than quantity here. Particularly for topics such as human diversity and prevention/promotion, a good video enhances student understanding substantially. In some chapters, we also provide Recommended Websites. These either provide further resources for instructors, or useful resources for student reading, or both.

Some chapters also include material from the 2^nd edition that was not included in the current text, but that we feel is still useful for instructors, and some new material that was developed for this edition but not included due to space limitations.

Each chapter also includes a Test Bank with both Multiple Choice and Essay Questions. We have written these at a variety of levels of difficulty, and to test basic factual knowledge, broader conceptual comprehension, or application of concepts. Multiple choice answers are given in brackets below the item, along with the page from which the question was taken. Essays vary in length of answer required. We encourage each instructor to develop additional items to fit your course aims and students.

We have also developed a set of Powerpoint slides for each chapter which are available separately from this Manual.

Alternative Orderings of Textbook Chapters

Community psychology course instructors have their own favorite ways to organize the concepts and themes of the field. Below are some suggestions for developing your own ordering of its chapters, while still building on the core concepts of the field and fostering student recognition of interrelated strands among community psychology concepts. All of our suggestions use Chapters 1-2 to introduce the field, although some instructors may choose to rely on Chapter 1 alone.

After the introductory chapters, you may proceed directly to Chapters 5-7 (ecology, community, diversity). To highlight an empowerment perspective early, you also may use Chapters 11 (empowerment and citizen participation) and 12 (empowerment and community and social change) much sooner than they appear in the book.

If your course has many clinically-minded students (this includes graduate students in clinical or counseling psychology, but is also the implicit focus of many undergraduates), enlarging their perspective to think ecologically and preventively may be an important goal. To engage their interest, you might assign Chapter 8 (coping) early, to highlight the integration of clinical and community concepts.

Alternatively, Chapters 8-10 (coping and prevention/promotion) can form an integrated unit on coping and prevention at some point in the course. Chapter 13 could be added to illustrate how local program evaluation can improve program implementation and quality. However, full coverage of community psychology requires covering Chapters 5-7 and 11-12 at some point.

You may wish to assign Chapter 13 (program evaluation) following the research focus of Chapters 3-4, to illustrate how the logic of scientific thinking can be adapted to practical community program monitoring and improvement. Some instructors assign Chapters 3, 4 and 13 near the end of the course. After chapters on ecology, community, diversity and empowerment, the emphasis in Chapters 3, 4, and 13 on participatory research and cultural anchoring may have deeper meaning. Our students also have found Chapter 13 useful for an evaluation component in papers proposing a community intervention.

These are only some possible orderings of chapters in this text. We encourage you to develop your own approach.

Pedagogy in the Textbook

We remain committed to integrating pedagogy into the text, to promote student reflection, discussion, application of concepts, and action. Chapters of the textbook contain several pedagogical features that are resources for you, the instructor.

Each chapter begins with a chapter outline, an “advance organizer” that students should scan before and after reading the chapter. For most chapters, an opening exercise promotes student interest and attunement to the chapter’s content. Throughout chapters, we use headings, tables, figures and boldface to highlight key terms, lists and topics. Chapter Summaries point students to the principal themes and concepts in the chapter. Recommended Readings invite further exploration of chapter topics.

Following some chapters, we list Recommended Websites, all of which we have reviewed. These are only an introduction to Web resources, and you may encourage students to identify, describe and critique other sites. Many websites are consumer-oriented, offering more practical information and suggestions than a textbook can, but students should exercise appropriate skepticism and consult multiple websites.

Course Structure

We strongly believe that community psychology should be taught as an applied course. We want students to leave the course with real knowledge, skills and abilities that they can then apply in their own communities. We hope that you share this goal, and will consider structuring your class in such a way that application is consistently and strongly emphasized. This section is designed to provide you with ideas for achieving that goal.

We recommend that you begin work on structuring your course with a visit to the Community Psychology Education Connection. Founded by Maurice Elias and Jim Dalton when they were new instructors seeking to improve the teaching, the Education Connection appears in The Community Psychologist newsletter for members of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) and on the SCRA website at http://www.scra27.org/resources/educationc/teachingcp. The website includes a wide array of teaching resources, including ideas for in-class exercises, innovative course assignments, resources related to service learning, and recommended DVDs. If this is your first time teaching community psychology, or if you are a long-time instructor looking for new ideas, we recommend that you start by perusing the sample syllabi on that site.

Another web resource that we highly recommend for both instructors and students is The Community Tool Box, at http://ctb.ku.edu/en/. The Tool Box is a project of the Work Group for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas, and has benefited from the work and contributions of a large group of international collaborators. It has been in development since 1994 and has as its vision “people—locally and globally—taking action together to change conditions that affect their lives.” Its mission is to build the capacity of communities to engage in effective change by providing clear, hands-on strategies and guidelines. The Tool Box is a wonderful and always evolving and expanding resource that we refer to repeatedly throughout the text and this manual.

For more about The Community Tool Box, read Chapter 13, Using Internet Technology for Capacity Development in Communities: The Case of the Community Tool Box by

Stephen B. Fawcett, Jerry A. Schultz, Vincent T. Francisco, Bill Berkowitz, Tom Wolff,

Philip W. Rabinowitz, and Rachel Wydeven Oliverius in Rothman, J. (2008) Strategies of Community Intervention, 7^th ed.

Service Learning

An excellent way to extend students’ experiential learning beyond the classroom is through community service learning. We especially encourage instructors to consider this activity, and to contact community settings or your institution’s office for service learning (if available) to discuss opportunities for your students.

An additional resource for using community service learning in community psychology courses is: Ferrari, J., & Chapman, J. (Eds.). (1999). Educating students to make a difference: Community-based service learning. New York: Haworth.

The following pages present two ways of integrating community-based service learning with community psychology concepts covered in our textbook. Cathy Crosby-Currie discusses her use of dialectical questioning, class discussion and journaling for students to make connections between their community experiences and course concepts. David Glenwick presents a format for summary papers that closely integrates student analysis of their community experiences with concepts from our textbook.

COMMUNTY-BASED LEARNING AND COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY:

LEARNING THROUGH EXPERIENCE

Catherine A. Crosby-Currie

St. Lawrence University

[Editor’s note: This paper describes the integration of community service learning with content and class discussion in an undergraduate community psychology course. Crosby-Currie emphasizes facilitating student discussion, journaling and analysis of community experiences, using community psychology concepts. This paper appeared in The Community Psychologist, Spring 2006, volume 39, number 2, pp. 27-29, and is used (with minor changes) with the permission of the editors and author. See The Community Psychologist Spring 2006 issue for additional articles on engaging students in community-based learning.]

I am often heard to say that I have been blessed as a professor with the opportunity to teach a course with a community-based learning component. One of the rewards of teaching is watching our students transform as individuals; community-based learning (CBL) has the potential to be transformative even if the professor does nothing to forward the learning process. Of course, our role as instructors is to attempt to ensure that the learning potential is actually fulfilled. In this essay, I describe my course in Community Psychology, which incorporates a semester-long internship, and discuss two techniques I use to create a learning environment where such transformation is more likely to occur. I begin by providing a description of the community within which my institution, St. Lawrence University, is located.

Community Setting

St. Lawrence University is found in the North Country of New York—the upper corner of the state west of the Adirondacks—in the village of Canton, population 6,000, in St. Lawrence County. Potsdam is about 11 miles away with a slightly larger population (8,000) and two additional universities—the State University of New York at Potsdam and Clarkson University. Another institution of higher education—SUNY-Canton—is also found in Canton. St. Lawrence County is geographically the largest county in the state but has only 112,000 residents resulting in the sixth smallest population density in New York. It is also predominantly white (95%).¹ Canton is the county seat and, as such, is home to two courts (both state and federal), the jail and the county Department of Social Services as well as all other county services. The nearest in-patient mental health services are located in Ogdensburg, approximately 18 miles away; a Chemical Dependency Unit is found at the Canton-Potsdam Hospital in Potsdam.

St. Lawrence County is large, isolated and not wealthy. The current unemployment rate for the county is 5.5%, somewhat higher than the national average of 4.9% (www.bls.gov). Median per capita income ($15,728) and family income ($38,500) are also lower than the state average. Approximately 12% of families exist below the poverty level, and single-parent families with a female householder are more likely to live in poverty especially ones with children under 5 years (56%).

This context suggests a few issues that must be kept in mind when we partner with the community. First, many of the human services settings in our county are understaffed. On the other hand, with four universities within a 12 mile span, we have lots of students. Therefore, without careful attention to the specific needs of our community partners, we could quickly overwhelm settings with student transforming a wonderful benefit into a burden. Second, our community partners have to serve a very large geographical area with a lot of need. For example, caseworkers must drive hundreds of miles each week to see their clients many of whom have no transportation. With no public transportation, cars are essential for student interns, and many spend some portion of their internship behind the wheel. Finally, despite its small size, Canton provides more opportunities for human service placements than most communities of its size. For example, the only resource for domestic violence services in the county, Renewal House, is found in Canton.

University Setting and Course Overview

Against this backdrop is St. Lawrence University—a small liberal arts college with an average enrollment of 2,000 students. In relative contrast to most residents of St. Lawrence County, most students at St. Lawrence University enjoy economic security and all benefit from a plethora of readily available services provided by the institution. Although our students tend to have family incomes in the middle income level and most (over 80%) receive some form of financial aid, very few have experienced poverty and most have come from areas less secluded than Canton. Many of our students are interested in careers in human services and education; psychology is one of the most popular majors. Not surprisingly, community-based learning experiences are sought by many students. We have established the Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership (CCEL), one goal of which is to coordinate CBL activities across campus.

My CBL course is an upper-level seminar entitled Community Psychology, for which students are required to devote about 8 hours per week to an internship. Enrollment averages 10 students, and we meet once a week in the evening for three hours. All of the students are junior and senior Psychology majors, and almost all take the course not to learn about Community Psychology but rather to gain some hands-on experience in the community. Until recently, my course was the only course in the department to offer an internship experience.

Given the concerns articulated above, I work closely with the CCEL staff to match internships with my course content and not to overwhelm our community partners. My most common sites are Head Start, the Chemical Dependency Unit of the Canton-Potsdam Hospital, Reachout (a local resource hotline), and Renewal House. I also place at least two students per semester with the Department of Social Services in a program that the director of the CCEL, the agency and I developed together. The program, which is still evolving and has presented many challenges, pairs a student intern with at least one adolescent either in foster care or at-risk for entering foster care. The intern’s responsibility is to act as a role model and support for the child while helping him or her develop social and cognitive skills.

Activities at the different internship sites have some common characteristics. Almost all include some form of training by the site itself. All include client contact, although this contact varies considerably from site to site. At Head Start, almost 100% of the intern’s time is spent working directly with the children. At Renewal House, on the other hand, interns spend most of their time working with the staff rather than the clients. With the exception of the Chemical Dependency Unit, all of the sites involve the provision of community-based services, and the work often has a secondary prevention focus. Some internship sites also include primary prevention. For example, an intern working with an elementary school counselor this past fall delivered a bullying prevention program to several classrooms.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut: Techniques for Engaging Students

My course has two main purposes—an introduction to some of the basic issues, concepts and methods in the area of Community Psychology, and experiential learning through an individual internship placement in a community setting. I make clear to the students that the substance of the field and the students’ internship experiences will inform, influence and impact one another. Below I discuss two pedagogical strategies I employ to facilitate students’ learning—reflective journaling and classroom discussions of the internships—and provide some feedback from student essays and course evaluations. However, before I discuss these specific strategies, it is important to set the philosophical framework for my teaching.

I am a great believer in the concept of “teaching with your mouth shut”—a phrase coined by Donald Finkel (2000). Finkel defines good teaching as “the creating of circumstances that lead to significant learning in others” (p.8). In some courses, such as Introductory Psychology, those circumstances almost inevitably incorporate the imparting of knowledge about the subject matter through lecture. In other courses, however, where we are not constrained by content requirements and students have a foundation of knowledge to build upon, teaching through telling is less necessary and, from my perspective, most often less effective at achieving learning objectives. In my Community Psychology course, I expect the students to learn by engaging with each other, with the course material and with their community-based experiences; I never lecture. Obviously, this teaching philosophy is highly consistent with the values of Community Psychology such as collaborative action and empowerment.

The first tool that I employ is a dialectical or double-entry journal, which must include a section of description and a section of reflection for each internship visit. Journals are electronic and submitted to me about every other week. I provide them with a series of optional and required prompts for each journal submission. The required prompts correspond to the material we are studying about Community Psychology. For example, one of the required prompts for the first journal submission is the following:

All of your placement sites would sit at the organizational level of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological levels. However, they all interact with individuals/groups that exist at some or all of the other levels. For example, St. Lawrence University is an organization, but it must interact with individuals (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.), localities (Canton, St. Lawrence County, North Country), etc. Describe the systems with which the staff of your internship site must interact/work with/collaborate with to be able to do their work effectively. From your initial impressions, how well does your organization interact with those other levels?

Because some students find unprompted reflection difficult at times, I also provide some optional prompts for each set of journal entries based on the kinds of issues that either typically arise at different points in the semester or might be appropriate to consider at some point during the semester. Optional prompts from about half-way through the semester include: what are you the most proud of thus far at your internship and why? How can you learn from that success? What is frustrating you the most and why? How might you resolve the problem if you can? If you can’t do anything about it, how are you going to cope for the rest of the semester? I find that about a third of my students make use of these optional prompts at some point during the semester.

I respond to their reflections within the journal itself and often include questions for further thought creating an opportunity for dialogue within the journal. I stress the importance of the journal for the students’ learning process, and it carries the most weight (equal to the internship itself) of any component of their course grade. Students report that the journal is often a key mechanism for their learning. As one student said in her final reflective essay this semester, “I could not have gained so much had I not kept a journal explicitly detailed…Now that I have it to look back on, I see how invaluable it is and will remain.” Almost every student who continues to be involved in the community beyond the course vows to continue their reflective journal. Whether they do so or not, the consistency of this vow indicates the power of the journal to the learning experience.

Second, I make a very conscious effort to create a community of learners within the classroom where they are learning from each other’s internships not just their own. The major strategy that I use for this purpose is classroom discussions and exercises relevant to the internship. Almost every class begins with an open discussion of the internships. Although I sometimes prompt the discussion with a question—such as “Anyone have something surprising happen this week?”—more often than not, the discussion needs no prompting. Three times during the semester, we spend the entire three hours on a series of exercises that relate directly to the internship experiences—one early on focused on getting the most from the internship, one half-way through focused on successes and challenges faced and one at the end focused on termination issues. We also spend a class on the BaFa BaFa cross-cultural simulation (Shirts, 1977), led by former Community Psychology students.

Although I use many different activities to develop an environment conducive to open dialogue among the students, one of the foundational tools is a set of guidelines for dialogue that the students develop themselves.² In the second class meeting, students throw out ideas about their expectations for our classroom dialogue. I type up their thoughts and present them in the next class where we categorize the specific items under themes; I provide them with the revised version in the next class. Twice more during the semester, we revisit our guidelines to evaluate how well we are following them and to determine whether we want to make any changes. Because the students feel ownership of the guidelines, this revisiting usually resolves any problems in the discussion dynamic—for example, one student monopolizing conversation or another not contributing enough—without the need for any additional intervention on my part. Students state that the environment is conducive to learning by, as one student put it, “being open to discussion, being realistic about all internship experiences and making all experiences—good or bad—learning ones.” Every semester students report in course evaluations that they learned a great deal through these discussions and exercises where they shared and processed experiences as a group. They also report that the open dialogue was not confined to the classroom—“every class time was a meaningful, life applicable situation or scenario that created dialogue within the class that extended oftentimes to the walk home or lunch table the next day.” Students often say they learned more from each other in this class than in any other.

I would like to end with a quote taken from the final reflective essay of one of my students this past fall semester. This student was placed with DSS in the program I discussed above. In the already challenging context, we struggled this fall with too many interns, communication problems, and case worker burn out. The student began her essay with an example to illustrate the importance of moving beyond first-order change: “[i]t may be found that elderly people are leaving the North Country in substantial numbers and that the one thing that would make a big difference would be someone coming to shovel their driveway!” After reflecting upon her challenging internship experience and our study of Community Psychology, she summarized her experiences as follows, returning to her example:

I cannot say my experience at the Department of Social Services was easy but I can say that it was an invaluable learning experience for me. My studies of community psychology this semester have also had a profound impact on me, for I am now considering this field for a career choice…My family and close friends tell me that I suffer from “change the world” syndrome and I believe that community psychology would enable me to do that one snowy driveway at a time! Problems between individuals and their community are often deep and complicated. This class has taught me that through a great deal of patience and hope, small changes can eventually turn into improved relations between individuals and communities.

Community-based learning is not easy—either from the perspective of the student or the faculty member—but it is worth it.

Further Information

If you would like copies of any of the materials that I use for the course, please contact me at cacrcu@stlawu.edu.

Endnotes

[1] Links to the data in this paragraph and the following can be found at http://www.co.st-lawrence.ny.us/Census2000/Census-home.html.

² My colleague, Dr. Traci Fordham-Hernandex, introduced me to this technique.

References

Finkel, D. L. (2000). Teaching with your mouth shut. Boynton/Cook Publishers: Portsmouth, NH.

Shirts, R. G. (1977). BaFa BaFa: A cross culture simulation. Simulation Training Systems: Del Mar, CA.   http://www.stsintl.com.

IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS: STUDENTS’ REFLECTIONS ON THEIR COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY SERVICE-LEARNING EXPERIENCES

David S. Glenwick

Fordham University

[Editor’s note: This paper details the requirements of a summary paper on students’ community service learning, in a variety of settings, as part of a community psychology course that uses our textbook. Glenwick emphasizes integration of concepts from the text with analysis of community experiences. This paper appeared in The Community Psychologist, Spring 2006, volume 39, number 2, pp. 36-38, and is used (with minor changes) with the permission of the editors and author. See The Community Psychologist Spring 2006 issue for additional articles on engaging students in community-based learning.]

As part of the advanced undergraduate community psychology course that I teach at Fordham University, students participate in a community-based, service-learning experience of at least 3 hours weekly. After a brief overview of these experiences and their integration into the classroom context, the present paper focuses on students’ final papers as a means of fostering introspection on their field placements.

Overview of the Service-Learning Experience

At the start of the course, in consultation with the instructor, students select a human service setting in which to fulfill the service-learning component. These choices are generated by the students’ individual interests and involve programs in which they currently are or potentially desire to be involved. The sites span a wide range, including after-school tutoring programs, elementary school classrooms, urban community centers, university emergency medical services (EMS), shelters for homeless families, church youth groups, housing and neighborhood redevelopment organizations, campus tour services, university counseling centers, and hospital psychiatric units, among others. To facilitate their entry into and involvement in the organization, the students usually assume direct service delivery roles (e.g., teacher’s aide, group co-leader, lifeguard, clerical worker, EMS technician). However, for purposes of classroom discussion and their final papers, the emphasis is not on these individual activities but on analyzing the organization from a community psychology perspective.

Dalton et. al.’s (2001) text, Community Psychology: Linking Individuals and Communities, provides the organizing lens for this analysis. As topics are covered throughout the semester, classroom discussion relates the central themes (e.g., core values, models of ecological context coping and social support, empowerment, prevention and wellness promotion) to the students’ placements. Such application perforce provides each student with numerous opportunities to contribute to discussions and aids them in shifting from the individual to the systemic level in thinking about their activities. These discussions both provide an intellectual, conceptual framework for their experience and help operationalize abstract constructs, making them more comprehensible and meaningful. An important aspect of this is consideration of how context—specific characteristics of the settings—affects the manifestation of these concepts. Salient among these dimensions are settings inhabitants’ age, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status (SES), ethnicity and race, religion, and geographical location.

In addition to promoting classroom interaction on their service-learning experiences, Kloos et al.’s framework also is utilized to facilitate students’ reflections on their placements in their final papers (worth one-third of their course grade). It is to these reflections that we now turn.

Students’ Reflections in Their Final Paper

At the beginning of the course, students are given guidelines for the 10- to 15-page final paper. Handing out these guidelines at that early point enables the students to begin thinking like community psychologists (i.e., at multiple levels of analysis) from the start and to keep in mind the conceptual road map that we will be navigating during the semester and that they will be expected to connect to their experiences on both semiweekly (i.e., in class) and cumulative bases.

The final paper’s purpose is succinctly stated in the guidelines’ opening sentence: “The final paper is intended to help you reflect upon your field placement within the context of the course, applying the main ideas and concepts of community psychology to your organization/agency (o/a).” Eleven areas then follow, with students told to devote one to one-and-a-half pages to each. These areas, along with illustrative student responses, are the following:

1. “Describe your o/a. What is it? Where is it located? Who are its staff? Who are its clientele/members? What is its mission (i.e., goal)? By what means (services, activities) does it attempt to accomplish this?” This fairly straightforward introduction gives the instructor a sense of the context of the student’s experiences and sets the stage for the paper’s ensuing, more subjective sections.
2. “Which of the seven core values of community psychology does the o/a seem to emphasize? What is the basis for your statement? To what extent do stated values agree or disagree with what you’ve observed?” The seven values are individual wellness, sense of community, social justice, citizen participation, collaboration and community strengths, respect for human diversity, and empirical grounding. A church youth group promotes wellness in the form of spiritual well-being and citizen participation in having its members choose the lesson for the day. An urban community center promotes respect for human diversity by having training sessions for employees to enhance diversity awareness and cultural competence. A housing and neighborhood redevelopment program promotes social justice by allocating resources to encourage affordable housing.
3. “Pick one quantitative and one qualitative method for doing community psychology research and design a study of some aspect of your o/a from each of the methods. What would you be investigating? How would you go about it? What would be the strengths and limitations of each approach for understanding you o/a?” Qualitative interviewing of elementary school pupils following their school’s Cultural Awareness Day could assess what they learned from one another. A quantitative longitudinal experiment could compare the effects of English versus bilingual flyers on a community center’s membership participation and renewal rates. Prospective college students and their families on campus tours could be surveyed as to their reactions. An epidemiological approach could be taken with EMS call data to see if particular physical and psychological problems were prevalent.
4. “Pick two of the conceptual models of ecological content and analyze your o/a from each perspective. After doing so, consider: What unique information does each model give you about your o/a?” The five models are Barker’s ecological psychology and behavior settings, Kelly’s four ecological principles, Moos’ social climate dimensions, Seidman’s social regularities, and environmental psychology. Seidman’s model can elucidate role-relationships between preschoolers and teachers, preschoolers and volunteers, and volunteers and teachers in a homeless shelter classroom. Barker’s program circuits and deviation-countering circuits can explain the behavior of members of an urban condominium board. Kelly’s principles are useful in understanding the cycling of resources between a university counseling center and dormitory resident advisers.
5. “(a) Which of the nine key dimensions of human diversity is most salient for your (o/a) (it can be more than one dimension)? What is the basis for your statement? How is the o/a sensitive to this (these) dimension(s) in its functioning? (b) Describe ways in which your o/a is culturally sensitive (think of both surface structure and deep structure) and suggest ways in which it can become more culturally sensitive.” Campus tour guides reflect differences in race, ethnicity, age, SES, gender, and sexual orientation, with a recent especial openness to gay and lesbian students. An afterschool tutoring program is particularly sensitive to the Chinese background of many of its tutees and their parents. A homeless shelter’s preschool program promotes cultural diversity in its flags, books, and dolls.
6. “Apply the McMillan-Chavis model of sense of community to your o/a. Describe your o/a with respect to each of its four elements.” The four elements are membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. A church youth group facilitates membership—a sense of belonging and identification with others—through its binder with the church logo and its members’ acceptance of Jesus Christ; it promotes a shared emotional connection through friendships and spiritual bonds. Group therapy in a psychiatric ward allows the group as a whole, as well as individuals within the group, to have influence and also fosters a shared emotional connection.
7. “Coping and social support: What stressors does your o/a attempt to address? What resources (e.g., social support, psychosocial competencies) does it attempt to provide and/or develop in order to help its members cope with stress? How does it do this? What coping responses seem to be favored by members of this o/a?” A condominium board employs a problem-focused plan to deal with the stressor of drug-dealing tenants. A housing and neighborhood redevelopment organization offers workshops to ease the transition of buying and moving into one’s first house. Group therapy in a psychiatric ward provides social and emotional support. Workshops in a university counseling center attempt to improve such student competencies as stress management and interpersonal relationship skills.
8. “Design a prevention or wellness promotion program for you o/a. What risk factors would your program attempt to reduce and what protective factors would it attempt to increase?”
9. “What might be some barriers to the effective implementation of the program you designed in question 8? How might you increase the chances of effective implementation?” An elementary school could attempt an obesity prevention program by serving healthy food and using older students as models to promote healthy choices. A university EMS could develop primary prevention groups to prevent excessive alcohol use and thereby reduce EMS emergencies; one barrier to implementation would be the current social acceptability of undergraduates becoming intoxicated.
10. “How does your o/a foster participation in decision making and empowerment among its members? How might it do this better?” In a homeless shelter preschool program, youngsters assist peers in need. At an urban community center, employees’ input is sought regarding the creation of new programs; members’ input could be solicited as well. In a university EMS, experienced members mentor newer ones. In an afterschool tutoring program, tutors encourage the children to first try to solve homework problems on their own, with assistance gradually increasing as necessary.
11. “Describe how you would evaluate your o/a’s effectiveness, with respect to both (a) process and (b) outcomes and impacts.” A church youth group could keep track of how many youths commit their lives to Jesus Christ in public declarations (short-term outcome). In ensuing years do the youths stay in church and become involved in adult groups (long-term impact)? A university counseling center could videotape sessions to see if staff members are implementing services at a high level of fidelity and quality (process evaluation). A housing and neighborhood redevelopment organization could conduct interviews with new home-owners to assess their perceptions of whether the organization is accomplishing its goals.

Evaluation and Conclusion

Although students in the course have not evaluated the service-learning component separately, they have been asked “to what extent [their] interest in the subject matter has increased as a consequence of this class.” The mean response of the most recent class (N = 10) was 7.9 on a 9-point scale (where 7 = agree and 9 = strongly agree). Their mean overall rating of the course was 7.7 on this same scale. Written comments by, as well as conversations with, students indicate that they have valued the close linkage between lecture/class discussion/text, on the one hand, and field placement, on the other. The latter helps make the content and constructs of community psychology more “real,” while the former stimulates them to view their service-learning activities from a more systemically oriented vantage point.

The framework of Dalton et al. utilized in guiding my students’ analyses appears to serve them, and the course, well. However, the particular lens adopted is less important than that it be one that (a) encompasses the major themes of the field and (b) is heuristically applicable to a broad array of service-learning settings—in other words, that it presents community psychology to our students as a discipline that has both intellectual substance and relevance to the actual communities in which we live and learn.

For Further Information

Contact information: dglenwick@aol.com

References

Dalton, J. H., Elias, M. J., & Wandersman, A. (2001). Community psychology: Linking individuals and communities. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.