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Learning Political Engagement from the Experts: Advocacy Groups, Neighborhood Councils, and Constituency Service

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2006

Siegrun Fox Freyss
Siegrun Fox Freyss
Affiliation:
California State University, Los Angeles
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Extract

This article describes an uncommon approach to service learning. To demonstrate points of access to the political system, I place students in my class with experts of the political advocacy process, not with charitable nonprofits. And to reach a wide spectrum of students, I integrate the service-learning component in one section of the basic American and state government course, which is a general education requirement for all college graduates in the state of California. This report explains the approach, evaluates the course based on student responses, identifies reasons for its success, and points out some of the limits encountered. The article follows the tradition of Battistoni (2000), Battistoni and Hudson (1997, 1), Zlotkowski (1998), and others by sharing insights into the theory and practice of service learning in political science, in the hopes of making transparent the advantages and limits of this form of experiential learning.I am grateful to the department of political science, the college of natural and social sciences, and the dean of undergraduate studies at the California State University, Los Angeles, for supporting my modification of one section of the POLS 150 course to include a service-learning component. I also wish to thank Ted Anagnoson and Jan Mackay for their constructive comments as I developed my service-learning course. The researchers at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching deserve a word of appreciation for including my course in the Political Engagement Project, and finally a thank you should go to the anonymous reviewer of the original manuscript.

Type
THE TEACHER
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , January 2006 , pp. 137 - 145
Copyright
© 2006 The American Political Science Association

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