I wish I knew how to say that in

							    Service-Learning in Italy: Exploring the Relationship Between Volunteerism &
                                        Academic Institutions
                                               Siena, Italy
                                            April 12th, 2008



Afternoon Workshop
Moderators: Nevin Brown, Lavinia Bracci & Alfonso Casella


[Nevin Brown]
I wish I knew how to say that in Italian. I know how to say buongiorno, but what’s the afternoon…


[Participant 1]
Buon pomeriggio
Buona sera


[Nevin Brown]
Ok. I’m Nevin Brown from the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership, I’m
joined by Alfonso and by Lavinia from Siena Italian Studies, and also by Mike who’s an audience
member this time.


What’s being passed out are two sample syllabi for a course that I want to talk to you about.
This is going to be in three sections, I will talk a little bit about sort of a generic outline of the
course that Lavinia had mentioned earlier today called Institutions in Society, Then we’ll hear from
Alfonso and Lavinia too a little bit about the specific syllabus that they’re using for that course here
in Siena. And then I’ll talk a little bit about a course that has been designed for when students return
to their home institution and home culture to help them then integrate what they’ve learned during
their service-learning experience into their home environment, because a lot of our students at least
who come to the intl. partnership’s programs, are very familiar with service-learning in the U.S. and
often are going back to continue doing s-l in their home institutions. I want to explain, I think that’s
relevant for this audience, for many of you, because you are actually working with US students who
are coming to Italy for an Italian experience of one kind or another but they’re going home and so
this part may be one thing that will help you communicate, either with their home institutions or
with the students themselves about how they can take what they’ve learned here and apply it to their
home environments.


The title of this session “Why and how is service-learning academic and how does it differ from
volunteerism” is really to focus our attention on the fact that this truly is academic work. I think one
of the challenges early on for S-l in the us at least was that many people thought “oh this is very soft
education, it’s not really academic, it’s not rigorous, it’s not related to what we would think of as an
academic course” but indeed it is because the core of this is about student learning, as well
obviously about the service, but for our purposes here we’re looking at student learning.


Our organization is 26 years old and we’ve been involved in some kind of service-learning
programming for undergraduate students since about 1984. Very early on it was very clear that
there needed to be some kind of course that would help students understand in greater depth about
the culture, the society the nation in which they were going to do a service-learning program. And
so the first handout that you have which is entitled “Institutions in (Ecuadorian/Jamaican etc)
Society”…This is in a sense the template or outline that my predecessors Linda Chisholm and
Howard Barry, to whom Alfonso referred to a few minutes ago, that they developed starting in the
late 1980s, this particular version was done in 2005 and briefly updated in 2008. There is one
mistake in it it’s not 4 related elements it’s 3 related elements, so just please note that on the first
page. So what I want to do is just briefly go through this sort of overall template for the course and
talk a little about how some locations in our particular network of institutions have changed it a
little bit to reflect the particular issues and qualities of a society in a particular location and then we
can move to then how it has been done here in Siena which will be of particular relevance to those
of you working in the Italian context. So as I said there are 3 related elements, one is the actual
classroom experience. This is the outline for what happens in the actual classroom. And so the focus
essentially is every week during the course this outline is intended to provide an insight for the
student into various aspects of the culture and society in which they are studying and serving. Now
the topics can vary quite a bit you’ll notice for example that one of the challenges for those working
with us institutions for example… is how in the world with this be counted when the students go
home. Often it’s counted as sociology but it can be anthropology or a variety of other social science
courses and you’ll see why in a moment, because some of the topics that are at least suggested as
possibilities include geography, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science of a
political nature of the society in which the student is serving, the educational system…so
educational issues. Obviously the language, not just the instruction of the language but linguistics
for example here in Siena there is a sociolinguistics course that the students take. Literature,
religion, and philosophy, ethics and at least as we have conceived it, leadership can be a topic
although again we had a bit of discussion earlier today about the complications that that provides in
the Italian context.


And so generally when you look across the particular programs with which my organization is
involved, this is about a 13 to 15 week course. And essentially in most cases the students are taking
this one time a week, or sometimes divided up a bit more, but about 3 hrs a week. And the students
are doing readings of about 50 pages a week, and sometimes it can be from monographs to zerox
materials, a variety of readings that you can provide to the students. In addition, depending on the
location but in some locations they do a weekly writing assignments, based on the information that
they’re being provided in the course. Sometimes they are more longer-term papers and you’ll
actually hear a little more about the paper that is required here in Siena. So there’s that issue but
also I think another element of this course is about trying to provide in a sense a theoretical
underpinning for what the students are doing in their service assignment. But it’s not about trying to
prove or disprove theory in fact, providing different theories or different perspectives on various
topics can be very useful for the students, because one of the issues for us at least in the
International partnership, is not to provide factual information so much as to provide different
perspectives on the society. The term that we’ve been using now it for several years is
“complicating the perspective” of the student. Forcing the student to begin thinking hard about
some of the questions, some of the controversies, some of the different ways that the society looks
at itself, and therefore how the student can look at the society in which he or she is serving. So it’s
not about the straight presentation of facts, it’s really about getting the student to begin to ask
questions in these topics about the culture and society.


Then linked to this is the service. And there are two ways in which the service is linked, one is that
of reflection, so the student is keeping some kind of written journal or written weekly product so the
student is reflecting on what he or she is seeing in service versus what he or she is seeing in the
classroom and there’s another section here about reflection. But also in our particular model we’ve
also suggested that one of the ways the service is linked to the academics is by asking the student to
write a paper about the service agency or the place were the student is doing service. And so the
second piece of this outlines for you some of the issues that you might ask students to begin asking
about the location of the service and also what is going on in the service, what is the history and
mission of the agency? For example if you look at the schools here in Siena about which Mike
spoke, what’s the history of that reform that Lavinia mentioned, some of the legal reforms under
which this institutionalized English program has been fit into, what are the staffing structures of the
organization, who have been its leaders, who leads it now who did in the past, how do those leaders
function? How does the agency function? How is the agency governed? Who are the board of
directors? Who sets policies of the organization? Who does the agency serve and what are the
conditions of life that they bring to the agency’s organization, the kinds of services they need to
provide? Again studying more about the clients of the agency which begins to tell you in many
cases elements of society that are often never seen or talked about by a traditional study abroad
student, because you’re getting underneath the culture now and seeing a lot about the needs in the
culture. How does the staff work with these people? What are the kinds of relationships? Are there
hierarchical relationships going on? What might that tell you about the nature of the society in
which you’re working and learning? Are there other agencies in the community that work with
similar people or do similar kinds of work? What’s the larger context in which you’re engaged?
What are the questions that are coming up for the agency faces as it looks towards the future? So
again, questions that help the student really analyze what’s going on beyond just the service they’re
providing to the clients but what’s going on within the agency itself. So trying to use, again, the
service location as a place of academic activity, in this case of written activity. And in the reflection
as I mentioned, one thing I’ll just point out, the Intl. partnership has developed a tool in a sense… a
book called Charting a Hero’s Journey by Linda Chisholm, one of our founders, which is really
designed to help students carry out their reflective activity for about a 12 week period from the
beginning to the end of the service experience. A copy of that is located out at the front today and
can be ordered from our organization. This is a proposed structure that we put out for our programs
around the world 15 to 20 years ago as sort of the core, service-learning Institutions and Society
course that we recommended that our programs use. And I would say that if you looked across at
the various programs within our particular network of institutions around the world around the
world you’ll find that a course of this type on one way or another is being taught but the format can
be different from place to place, but also sometimes the emphasis can be different for example in
Jamaica, where we have program in Kingston the capital of the country, they have a focused a lot of
attention on literature. Because there is a very large literature, especially novelistic literature about
the Caribbean by Caribbeans, and so they feel that by having the students spend a fair amount of
time reading Caribbean literature that gives them an insight into some of the dimensions of
Caribbean life, and therefore Jamaican life and some of the issues that Jamaicans confront in their
everyday life both in Kingston and elsewhere. In India, where Hinduism is obviously a very
important factor in the lives of Indians, they spend a lot of time talking about religion and society,
because that is such a formative aspect of life for most Indian families and Indian people. The same
thing in the Philippines, where religion is front and center in the lives of many Philippino people.
And so those programs you’ll see a lot more emphasis on religion as a topic. In India also you’ll see
a lot of emphasis on the arts. Because Calcutta where the program is located among other things is
sort of an intellectual and artistic capital for much of India and for example we have students doing
a lot of work on Indian dance as a part of their work in the service-learning program. So this can
vary a lot in terms of the content of the course according to the specific nature of the society in the
culture in which the students are serving and studying. So, in Italy therefore, Siena Italian Studies
has developed a syllabus which I believe you also have in your hands. IPSL in Siena Socio-
anthropology Institutions in Society syllabus. And so I’ll leave it to Alfonso and to Lavinia maybe
to say something about how you’ve taken this and made it very specific for the Italian context.


[Alfonso Diego Casella]


Thanks, so basically the Institutions in Society is divided into three parts, the first is about the
educational system, the Italian educational system compared to the European system as well, even
though we live in a European context with European laws we analyze the local aspects of our
education system. And then the healthcare system as well, analyzing Italian laws through this
system, and then the Immigration with immigration laws.
Basically we analyze these three major topics under three more aspects, under the sociological
aspect, under the anthropological aspect and under the legislative aspect as well. Particularly
regarding the immigration laws, as you’ve seen with the video, we want to represent the perception
of the others in particular how the American student sees the immigration phenomenon as
Americans. As you recall the documentary is called Remember You Were a Stranger, and actually
the documentary started with an image of Ellis Island compared with the post-modern picture of the
same immigrants as people who were sent 100 or 150 years before and who just gave as a warning
“Remember you were a stranger…”


So I can say the most passionate part for me as a teacher, and also for students, is the Immigration
part. They are very interested in all these social and anthropological dynamics. They were very
proud of participating in this multimedia paper, to do this work… it was something new and they
had a good energy for that.
Some times it’s a little bit different for the other aspects of the course. I don’t want to say that they
sleep in class, but it’s different, it’s a little bit rough to get all this information because it is
something that is unique to us, and it’s difficult to let them understand a completely different
system, not worse just different. Take for example the health care system, the title of my first
relation was “Healthcare who cares?” so the difference between the private system and the public
system, a sort of America vs. Europe. Why do we have a different system, what are the different
laws? What are the rules of the Italian laws? So we can see that because of the Misericordia, these
ancient charity institutions, we have sort of an idea of public healthcare. It’s something that belongs
to us as a Christian tradition, as a social tradition. And even when the Misericordia, which has
mainly Christian roots, appears in other association of mutual assistance, made of workers. Even
there the main aspect is the social aspect. So what I can say is that what we analyze in class is this
difference. The difference of roots, the Christian roots… social roots and the changing of Italian
rules over the years. Compared to the American system. With this context, this comparison I was
able to make them more enthusiastic, the class. Sometimes I was able to do a powerpoint lessons
with images, not only words in the slides because sometimes they need faces. Because when you
talk about European phenomena, when you talk about charity, when you talk about the social
founder of the Misericordia, they don’t even know what I’m talking about. They need to see a face,
a picture, a painting. When I told them about the walls of the city, to explain the phenomena of the
city states, I had to show them the stones. They come from modern cities where maybe the oldest
building was made maybe 100 years ago, so they can’t imagine what the stone is of an ancient wall.
Sometimes I realize that they don’t’ know what I’m talking about. So sometimes after my lessons I
say I need to show them something more, when I talk about healthcare I need to show them a
hospital in the 60’s I need to show them a picture, so that they can compare and see the differences
so they can be more energetic and participate with the multimedial context. I’m a little bit obsessed
by this but I think it is very important for them. Maybe because they are the millennium generation
and they need to touch and see and hear and use all their senses, if you just explain explain explain
after 15 minutes they can’t go ahead. So the healthcare system, with great passion, I try to explain
this great difference in our roots, Christian and social roots. These old Christian institutions and
institutions of social workers who created the first form of healthcare, because the first healthcare
was not created by the state. It was created by these ancient institutions, associazioni di mutuo
soccorso ecc. And then another hard aspect to explain is our system of education is completely
different. Our public schools. The reason why our schools are mainly public is also for a reason,
because when we became a nation, we are a quite young nation, we became a nation in 1861, so we
needed compulsory education because our king needed a collective identity. The school at the time,
we didn’t have any media, any television, so the school was the only means to create this container
for identity. It is very important to understand this phenomena. The school is a container of identity,
and our reforms, our first reforms of Italian education were based on this concept, and so the public
schools were sort of a monopoly of the culture of the power, while in the past the schools, the
universities belonged to the church. So the church had the monopoly of culture in the past in the
ancient age and then with the building of a state it became public. And then after that we had the
fascist reform. And even Mussolini used the schools to create a fascist culture in the community
fascistizzare the country. And this was so interesting because a student of mine Andrea, she was so
brilliant and when she wrote me the paper, I was so surprised that she analyzed the three Italian
churches, it’s a fantastic idea that I could use in my next class. So she said the first church is the
church, which used the church monopoly, the second church is the state which needed to build it’s
own identity, and the third church is Fascism that needed to create within the ideology a new sort of
religion. So I was surprised when I read this paper I said Oh my gosh, I have been able to transmit
to them my ideas...this is definitely the best satisfaction of the course.


Another important thing is Immigration law we analyze a very difficult topic as well, like the
different form of immigration, the fact that we don’t have any borders so between assimilation and
integration no melting pot is possible… so apparently sometimes they look at me like “what is he
saying?” but if you show them and you explain to them with images and things you can create a
different form of education and they can really participate, to a sort of an alternative form of
education. I was surprised when I showed them what is the first container of society, the first tribes,
the first civilization, in 2001 a Space Odyssey by Kubrick. So we started with the film with the
monkeys and they didn’t speak they didn’t say anything, and they just went around the totem and
looked at me as to say “what is he doing” and at the end of the lesson many of them were surprised,
we discussed how society was started from the beginning, and many of them asked me “what about
watching the movie?” because it’s not how we ended up. So I think another thing that is important
is a human aspect, because I don’t think it’s only my knowledge, but I think part of the work is done
outside, so I think that they grow up outside my course so I can see the differences in my students
when they try to deal with the others in the soup kitchen, discovering others. So I know that it’s not
only me, I know that I’m part of their change, but the main part is done by what they experience
outside. The best example that we did at the mosque in Colle val d’Elsa… that during the left
government with the Lega there were many protests about the development of the mosque, it’s very
strong this clash of civilizations. I brought a class of Americans, actually the whole school, and we
all went to the mosque and took off our shoes, and had a peaceful meeting with this Imam, and the
Imam was so enthusiastic about the visit and honored to have an American audience. And actually I
read the interview that you showed me and he said to the journalist “I was very pleased when the
class of American students came to visit me in my mosque so it is not true the clash of civilization”
so I was so proud to do something against this clash of civilization, and another thing that I learned
and that the students learned is that it doesn’t exist a clash of civility, only the uncivilized people
have clashes, but civilized people have peaceful relationships.


Another cool thing about that is that the media is Italian for the Americans and Imam spoke in
Italian.


[Nevin Brown]
I thought we might stop here to see if there are questions or comments about both what Alfonso’s
talked about how he has developed the course here with the help of the faculty. But also the overall
course outline that I gave to you and how I described it if you have questions or comments etc.


[Participant 2]
Yes well I have many questions… but I’d like to know if when you say we speak about these three
main topics… do you have them read some texts or do you bring… because here there are
bibliographies… but I think it would be difficult to read in Italian something like Balboni is the
book that you used… because they are quite high level Italian readings. Can they read them, do you
use excerpts? What method do you use?




[Lavinia Bracci]
Rispondo io.
Because we have to go back to our FICCS approach. The presentation of this morning. So we, being
an immersion program and all that you’ve heard. So what we do is give excerpts in Italian and then
more reading in English, and it’s a progression so it slowly goes from more readings in English to
more readings in Italian, and at the end of the course a book like Balboni at the end of the course
they would be able to read something like that.


[Participant 2]
So they read all these books?
[Lavinia Bracci]
No, there’s not a rule, it depends on what students do during the course of the semester but we often
integrate with newspapers and magazines etc. So this is the main reference and they definitely read
something from these books. The students guide this course a lot at the end, we know where we are
going but the students are the ones that …the same thing happens… in fact I need to add something
about the other part of the course which is reflection because the link between the service and the
Institutions and Society course is definitely the reflection. The famous hyphen… I think the hyphen
in service-learning represents reflection. That’s when the students are able to put the two parts
together. Ok.


[Participant 2]
So you are able to allow, or to decide semester for semester how many pages of what books you’ll
have them read.


[Lavinia Bracci]
Yes, this is our goal, sometimes we go beyond the goal and other times we stay just below the goal
because the students don’t allow us to do it. It depends. Last semester for example in the IPSL class
the language level of Italian was not improving as much as this, so we didn’t do as much as we
wanted and incorporated more English. So there is flexibility.


[Alfonso Diego Casella]
Yes just to add one thing, because it’s very important what you said because this is scientific
problems, of course because scientific language is very difficult. But first of all the lesson in power
point gives an idea, just to make them understand everything, to give a good example they also see
a great prodigal example. And they have access to the whole university library. I can suggest Italian
books, I can suggest Bauman in Italian, I suggest readings in English because it’s hard. But she read
it in Italian because you at the university can find books in both languages and it’s up to them of
course… Then Marc Augé… is also translated in French but is translated to Italian, to English, so if
you want to go deeply if you want to study. I also suggest also books for example if I talk about the
European union and during the second world war the flag of fascism a metaphor of Camus, you can
read Camus La Peste I don’t mind if you read it now or in ten years… you can find it in a bookshop
in New York and say that stupid old teacher! Ten years ago told me. Maybe one day you will be in
Paris learning French and you’ll find it. And then also movies, I also suggest watching movies. If
you want to see the disintegration of Europe during the second world war you can watch DeSica
Ladri di Biciclette, of course with English subtitles. But you can watch it in Italian. It’s interculture,
so it’s free so it’s up to you. But it has to be effective. So you can see results.


[Nevin Brown]
Other questions?


[Participant 3]
Yes I’m curious how many total credits students receive for a semester of service-learning?


[Nevin Brown]
We generally say it’s six credits with the reflection. Now in some cases in some of our programs
they decide to split the course in terms of credits into three or four for the classroom part and three
or four for the reflection. But if you look at the transcripts for the total credits they usually receive
six.


[Participant 3]
And that will be comprehensive of reflection, coursework and the actual service?


[Nevin Brown]
Right, although it’s important to remember that this is academic, so you0re not getting academic
credit for the service, but on the demonstrated learning through the course and the reflection. On the
products that the students are giving you back, on reflections, weekly entries or papers done in the
course rather than the service done in the service agency. I just realized that I continue to use the
term agency but do you use another term?


[Lavinia Bracci]
Yes we use associazione di volontariato because agency in Italian doesn’t work.
Yes it’s like travel agency.


[Nevin Brown]
Yes in English you don’t tend to think travel agency but in any case we mean the place where the
service is carried out. So the issue is tht you’re producing lots and lots of academic material that the
professor can read and grade so that you can actually give a grade for this. Now not every university
in the U.S. will necessarily accept the grade, some places will give a pass/fail for it but the
universities that we work with do usually give grades.


[Alfonso Diego Casella]
I wanted to insist just on a multimedial bibliography, you can find many sources on the internet
downloading information. I had a coffee just now with a student of mine from Boston where Noam
Chomsky teaches, and I gave her just two days ago all the Noam Chomsky conferences in MP3 in
dvds and we laughed because I said I’m from Italy and you’re from Boston and I’m giving you
these files! So there is a very large amount of material available to use.


[Participant 3]
Can I ask one more question?
We have a similar class at New York University and we try to value the experience also the
emotional experience that the student has at the site because they have a lot of concerns, issues
because at the beginning I think everyone does. And we found that it was really useful to have some
readings on that experience just to find a place or space for these concerns. Do you have something
similar or not?


[Lavinia Bracci]
I usually start from the other side, I actually start from their concerns and try to have them find, if
and when there are, links to the appropriate readings. We use one of the tools that one of the IPSL
founders created is useful Charting a Hero’s Journey that we use, but we use it in a reversed way. I
don’t have them read it first and then answer those questions. I have them ask themselves first those
questions while going on the site and then maybe a week later, have them read it. Also because this
book doesn’t have anything specific about Italy. So that it’s their own learning that has to be
confirmed.




[Nevin Brown]
Well let me turn our attention to the third hand out that I provided. Let me give you a little bit of
context for this, really two pieces of information. There’s a general point about student engagement
especially in international service-learning that makes them a little different from students involved
in traditional study abroad programs. And this is something that we’ve learned in our research, and
that others have learned as well and that is that students who have had this very intense immersion
experience through service- learning in another culture or society have a much harder time going
home. When they go back to the US they have a hard time, in a sense, adjusting because they’ve
had such an intensive exposure to another culture that they really wind up returning home with
more questions about their own society and often they find that there is no place to go to talk about
it. Study abroad officers on the campuses are usually very busy helping the next crop of students
going overseas, many students who might have been on a traditional study abroad program don’t
quite understand why this student is having difficulty coming home, so there is this issue about how
do you help a service-learning student when he-she returns, in this case, to the US. Secondly, many
students in the US even before they go on our service-learning programs, or any of them, are
already engaged in service-learning at home. They’ve been involved with a service-learning
program on campus or in the community and so they are often a little familiar with service-learning
before they even come on the program. So there are two issues here, sort of how can they in a sense
find a way to go home and feel like they’re able to use their experience in general and secondly, if
they’ve already done service-learning, how might they use their experience here, when they go
home as well.
What I’ve provided to you is the outline of a course developed by the University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill which is a large state university with a very large service-learning program and that
over the past few years has decided to add an international dimension both summer and semester for
it’s service-learning students. They found the same thing, they said we have students going overseas
and coming back and wondering, “gosh I had this great experience and nobody to share it with
where do I go”? And secondly UNC realized that the largest single group of people with whom
students were working in their domestic s-l work were Mexican immigrants, because as you know
in the united states, the largest immigrant groups are from Spanish speaking countries and Mexico,
central America and even to some degree south America. And particularly in North Carolina there
is a large number of Mexican immigrants in a state which is in the mid-southern part of the US that
had very little Spanish speaking immigration historically. And they were also finding one of the
reasons that they wanted their students to go on service-learning program, in this case in Mexico, is
that they wanted to help them be more effective in the service-learning with Mexican immigrants
when they returned home. So what this course is designed to do is to provide weekly sessions for
the students with readings and various activities specifically to help the students look at some north
Carolina specific issues in s-l that would help them translate, not just our program in Guadalajara
Mexico but also several other programs that the university now operates in Mexico and elsewhere,
to help them begin to think “what I learned in Guadalajara and other places, how do I use that then
in my s-l when I come home” and so what you’ll find when you look at their class schedule they’re
looking at things like global migration and local experiences, what’s happening in global migration-
how is that being reflected in north Carolina, schooling and education of immigrant children
because many of the experiences the students have in Mexico and also in Chapel Hill are with
Mexican children, so this is again helping them think about well I saw that in Guadalajara with kids
now I’m seeing the same thing in the schools in Chapel hill. Because the course is taught by a
professor of public health actually, they spend a fair amount of time looking at human health issues
and how that translates into issues into problems with issues that immigrants are facing in north
Carolina and so on and so forth, they then have a variety of both fiction and non fiction sources that
they have the students read but the other dimension of this, there are two dimensions, one, they
actually have students doing interviews of local immigrants to try and begin telling their stories and
developing their stories and sort of using the understandings they got in their Mexican experience
in those interviews, their also doing some video projects, their also doing things to help introduce
the Mexican children themselves in Chapel Hill to the idea of higher education because of course if
they’re going to stay they’re going to need higher levels of education in order to be successful, for
them the new society of the united states. So what I wanted to do here, the reason I’m talking about
this is several of you I know are from programs that are either US university programs for example
the NYU program in Florence or many of you are working with primarily students from the United
States and if you are looking at doing service learning you may start seeing students who have
some s-l experience who are going to have will have these issues when they go back to the US.
And so as you work with your home university people NYU for example, or if you have particular
relationships with US universities, people who are sending you students….you will not be able to
obviously do this course, but this is not about what you would do here but this is something you
need to know about because in order for your students to really take advantage of what they’ve
learned in the program here in Italy or wherever it happens to be. Then their ability to have this type
of opportunity when they go home is really very important. So I would say that for those of you that
have the direct relationship with the university in the US it would be important to talk with and
learn who the S-L coordinators are on that campus and what they could do to help the students gain
full advantage of the experience here or if you work with several universities maybe try to be sure
that you know something about the context to which you’re sending your students back because
maybe a way of helping that university develop a similar course. That’s the purpose of this because
I think, again, this is a very intensive experience for the students for example here in Siena where
you can imagine they are really involved in the community, the issues around immigration and
health care education and other things here, and I’m struck by the fact by the number of students
that seem to come here, come back. Mike is a good example, he wasn’t a service-learner but there
are other students… but there are others too in fact, I was just talking to one of the students who is
here now is planning on coming back in January. So there is a very powerful experience these
students are having.


[Alfonso Diego Casella]
It changes your life…


[Nevin Brown]
Exactly


So I think this is more to help you think about the relationship you have with the universities back
in the US and how you can help ensure that if you want to get involved in s-l here that students will
be able to take it back and make it effective at home.


[Lavinia Bracci]
Yes because, sorry, but I really feel sometimes – we have a really… comparing the number of
students, we have a really high percentage of students coming back. Incredibly high, and sometimes
I feel, I mean it’s great, it’s very rewarding but on the other hand I feel that it’s also it’s something
that it’s something that’s lacking there. They don’t find something there. So I think that that’s
something we should try to create as much as possible, to give them the tools to actually make their
experience back in the American context because the only solution is coming back. I don’t know, I
have this concern.


[Nevin Brown]
Right, it’s not a solution coming back. It can be for two people but not many…
Any questions about this or other issues we have raised this afternoon?


I’d be curious to know based on your experience today, how many of you now are seriously
interested in trying to put together some kind of a service-learning aspect or deepen the s-l aspect in
your programs here in Italy?
Or are you thinking still gee this is all very interesting but you’re not sure what to do about it yet.




[Participant 3]
Or how to apply it to our particular context and students, we have a, I can share, we have an
academic internship program and in fact a lot of the academic work for this is reflective writing,
journaling and so on and so forth, but it’s also just trying to see how it might fit in with our typical
student, because our particular student will not be immersed so…




[Nevin Brown]
And you’re from which program?


[Participant 3]
Fairfield University
We’re a Jesuit university in Connecticut we work with a school in Florence so service is part of our
mission and is something that the University pays attention to also the reentry and how to integrate
the service and the learning to the general curriculum so it’s something we’re definitely thinking
about and what can we tweak what can we take what might transform in to more service-learning
than what we’re already practicing. So it’s the start of a process. I don’t know, you might have
some suggestions in terms of something that could be academic service-learning but less of cultural
immersion. Maybe you could share a little more with the students and how it works on site.


[Lavinia Bracci]
We can go back to our first experiences because we became an immersion program but we were not
when Mike studied for example. And I can think of people working with the mentally disabled,
that’s a field where the language doesn’t have that much impact because communication goes
through different channels. So it’s really a matter of trying to see different possibilities but now it’s
just the first thing because now I remember at that time we were really not an immersion program
and it worked with people. So it’s one example.


[Participant 3]
Or teaching English or maybe…


[Mike Manchester]
Most of the things that I have students doing are things that are linguistically really easy, because I
have a lot of students that come and don’t know a lot of Italian. So working at the mensa dei poveri,
the soup kitchen, they’re just setting up, they’re getting direction from the people that work there in
Italian but they’re setting tables, serving food, and cleaning up. And so I think there are a lot of
different places where you can do service, where it’s not necessarily that crucial to know the
language.


[Lavinia Bracci]
The ambulance is different of course…but.


[Student 1]
Plus it’s really incredible what you pick up doing the service, because you’re learning the language
in a context.


[Nevin Brown]
Well we’ve had a program in the Czech Republic for several years that specializes in service,
because our program director at the time was always with learning disabled, and other disabled
individuals… and Czech, again most American students will never have any exposure to Czech
language before going to the Czech republic, and unlike Italian, Czech is not very easily learned
especially in a semester, but they’ve been working with these disabled individuals and the service
has never been a problem, because again it’s not so dependent on the facility of the language. A
couple other ideas by the way in that area, one is environmental projects. We actually have a couple
of sites now where environmental projects are a feature they actually happen to be both Spanish
speaking but nonetheless we’ve had some successful placements with those with needing to actually
do some physical work in some cases. And the other one just slipped my mind. Oh I know,
veterinary assistance. We’ve had a couple of projects, in the Galapagos, we have a program in the
Galapagos in Ecuador and we’ve had a couple of students working on veterinary and animal
quarantine issues there. And actually I know of anther s-l project which is not part of our program
but is actually a summer program on the island of Parros in Greece, and again through I think it’s
City Year or Year in Athens, one of those, they do a summer program in Parros and again most
students come to Parros with zero Greek. And she has found some success working on veterinary
projects there. So there are some ways in which you can think creatively about the kinds of service
opportunities or needs that exist.


[Mike Manchester]
And another thing that I mentioned in my workshop. We don’t have that many, Lavinia can confirm
that there is more of a trend of Summer students….
So I have relatively low numbers of service-learning IPSL students during semesters, but this
summer I have 21 people to put into services and I don’t have elementary schools during the
summer so I have to find different thinks, and figure out something for them to do. So that’s kind of
going against the grain a little bit of creating a need. I have a garden where I live that’s probably
about 5 or 6 times this room and it’s completely unused and so I’ve called the mensa dei poveri that
we work with and said ‘if we make vegetables would you take them?’ and so the idea right now is
not quite a service-learning project, right now it’s just people going and gardening so what I need to
do now is involve Italian students in the garden. And then I’d also like to involve the neighbors,
who are old retired people and involve them in the garden. So the idea would be to have the
students work with them. So to get some Italian involvement with Carlo or whoever. So that’s what
I’m working on now, so the students working at the soup kitchen would actually be the ones who
bring some food to the soup kitchen, actually producing things.
So for now it’s kind in the phase of who wants to come garden, just for fun, and we’ll see if I can
actually get things set up and organized and get some Italian students involved. One of our
professors’ uncle works for a huge consorzio agrario in Ferrara and can tell us all sorts of things and
talk to our students so realistically, since there is Italians and Americans in the same place a little bit
but the hole digging and planting and watering and you know, where more of the on sight work …
it’s just that sort of stuff for now.


[Nevin Brown]
We’ve had a couple of experiences in Jamaica, and Guayaquil, where we’re working with housing
organizations as well. Now there isn’t the language issue in Jamaica, but it can be, and we’ve had
students actually involved in sort of Habitat for Humanity kinds of projects. For those of you who
are not from the United States, Habitat for Humanity is a large organization that organizes
volunteers to build houses for low income individuals. And there are some organizations now in
places like Jamaica and Ecuador that are trying to build housing in very very distressed
communities. And so we’ve had some students literally involved in some of those building projects,
which again doesn’t demand huge amounts of linguistic ability but that does involve a lot of relation
activity, relational activity and meets a real need in the community. So that’s something else, I
don’t know what the housing issues are here, but it could be a potential.




[Participant 3]
I’m full of questions, may I ask one more?
Do you find your students come with a specific interest where they might want to work on one
specific project. Do you demand that there be a certain level of flexibility to adapt to different
settings and finally do they rotate from different settings or are the constantly at one?


[Mike Manchester]
Rotation no, I try to avoid having them rotate. We’d like them to have as profound of an experience
as possible. Should I keep going? The idea of the need is something I explain immediately to the
students. You can’t come here thinking ‘I’m going to save the world only working in orphanages’
because there are orphanages here and they’re pretty set, they don’t need American students to go
help them and they don’t really come asking for is. So the student that writes and says ‘I’m only
working with orphanage’ arrives and has a meeting with me, all students have a meeting with me
upon arrival actually. And I say orphanage, no, but here are the other 6 or 7 things we can do and
personally after having read your application and seeing the things that you’ve requested I have you
paired in this and this etc. A lot of times I have to explain what all this stuff means and why I think
it would be beneficial to them, sometimes in the initial meeting I’ll have a student tell me ‘but I
really really don’t want to work with elementary school kids’ so I see if I can give them some other
things. I had a student who was to work with some mentally disabled people and said it was fine in
the initial meeting and then due to his own learning disabilities he actually had some problems
there. And so most of the time I have to take students and put them where I need them to be,
sometimes they have a lot of complaints saying ‘this is really hard, I can’t really do this’ and I have
to reassure them saying these complaints come after the first time and of course it’s going to be hard
the first time, and then after two or three times it’s ok. Some situations with students with learning
disabilities I have to put them in a different place but I don’t rotate them once they’re in service
because usually they are all doing two or three different things. Working in the elementary schools,
in a restaurant that we have with the mentally disabled people, and working with the Misericordia,
they can do all three of those things. And they all do…absolutely.


[Lavinia Bracci]
Maybe that’s what you were asking by rotation?


[Mike Manchester]
Yeah so rotating in the sense, they don’t rotate during the semester one month here, one month
there. But they do do three or four different things simultaneously, because they need to do from
15-20 hours a week of service and I can’t with scheduling, and the fact that there are only 24 hours
in a day. And I think that IPSL would agree entirely in the students don’t get to choose what they
want to do.


[Nevin Brown]
Right, we do ask them on the application about the age group that they’d like to work with and
maybe the general issue, but we also emphasize that this is not just about you, because remember I
talked about the reciprocity this morning and it’s also about the needs of the community and so
we’re trying to balance both. And that’s actually an important part of the learning in this program is
that it’s not all about you. It’s also about how you’re relating to larger community needs, that’s
what service-learning in many ways is about.
So the other thing about rotation and whatever, we have some programs where the students only
have one assignment, and partly it’s because the nature of the assignment. Let me just talk about
one briefly and this is in Guayaquil in Ecuador. One of the service sites is a hospital/residence that
is for people that have or have had Hansen’s disease which is leprosy, which is still a small but
significant problem in Ecuador. And I visited this place actually and it’s a place, where what
happens many people with this disease is the families sort of don’t want them back even though
they’re cured. So they end up living there forever, that’s where they live. And actually this place has
a kind of infirmary for people who still have the disease but then a large area is for people who
can’t go home. And so our volunteers, or our service-learning students that we’ve placed there, and
we’ve had several, basically their job is to be a companion to these people. That’s what they’re
doing, and because of the nature of the relationship that they’re building they need to be there a lot.
And so to try and have them do other things and then maybe go once a week to the Hansen disease
hospital doesn’t work, that’s where they go and that’s what they’re doing for the whole semester. So
it depends a lot on the kind of social service location as to what kind of thing you might want to do.


[Mike Manchester]
We don’t really have anything quite like that here.


[Nevin Brown]
Right, so…in developing countries you run into a lot of very different kinds of situations too
obviously.


[Participant 4]
Can I ask one more question?
Do you require the agencies to be non-profit or do you have also profit agencies?


[Nevin Brown]
I would say, for our particular model we’ve been primarily focused on private non-profit
organizations but, this is an example, we haven’t tried this yet, but we have a very small program in
Moscow in Russian and one of the things that our program director says that he feels is a great need
in Russia right now is help with things like building a kind of middle class business culture and so
there might be an opportunity there for service-learning, building in a sense a kind of business
culture among middle class people in Russia where that’s not the tradition. Which would involve,
maybe working with profit organizations and we’ve never done that before. But I don’t think it’s
impossible either. I think, again, the issues is what’s the particular need, is it a particular need in
that society or culture? And how best do you meet it? And sometimes profit-making organizations
may need to play a role in that so I think the one thing you want to be sure is that this is not simply
about a sort of business internship or something like that. I think you’ve got to be very careful about
what is the need that’s being met and how it’s being met. And how is the student being used to meet
that need.


[Mike Manchester]
All of our agencies are non-profit.


[Participant 4]
Ours as well but sometimes I notice that if you collaborate with a profit making organization they
are open to longer activities each week, so we have five hours a week and it is not enough for
business organizations such as publishing companies. I mean we have contacts with business
organizations in a cultural environment so we use publishing companies, web companies, website
companies that wanted to translate into English some of their public websites so they were more
willing to accept volunteers for 8 hours or 10 hours a week. But then we did not want to do this
kind of collaboration because we had the feeling that they were not going to hire people if they had
our volunteers…so this is the limit.


[Nevin Brown]
Right, you’ve got to be careful about exploitation.


[Alfonso Diego Casella]
But there is no social meaning in doing that.


[Participant 4]
It is hard to judge the social meaning, what tools do you have to judge the social meaning for a
publishing company. It’s hard.


[Nevin Brown]
Remember again that this is non-paid volunteer activity as well, I would never advocate that a
student be paid for that as a part of a service-learning program that’s not really the point.


[Participant 5]
I have just a small question. What is the average level of Italian of your students?


[Lavinia Bracci]
Our students, they don’t have prerequisites they can come with no Italian, so we have many
beginners in the end. Half of them are definitely beginners of any given group. Then we have few
advanced students and then we have almost the other half of intermediate. So it’s a little bit of
everything but we definitely have many beginners. It’s just that the pace is quick, they improve so
fast that’s the main difference because it’s an immersion program but the amount of beginners, we
have many. And we work with many schools that don’t have majors in Italian.


[Participant 5]
But how can you manage?


[Lavinia Bracci]
Well, you remember this morning the whole FICCS presentation? Language classes are structured
with the European framework levels so that’s something that everybody knows but the content
classes, the Institutions in Society class for IPSL but other classes as well, we’ve developed this
concept of non-level teaching so we put students of different language levels together but basically
if you have a class of 10 students and it’s an art history class and you have three people who are art
history majors and the rest have different majors, the ones that are art history majors, even if their
language levels are lower than the others, they already have the tools to learn and they have
different competencies. So work on the integration of competencies. So that’s what we do in theory,
then we should sit in class and see how that happens so the collaboration among the students
becomes very important because someone knows all the subjunctive already in Italian but has no
idea not even about art history but about history, because so many of our students don’t know
anything about history so at that point we balance the competencies and it works really well.
Especially because it motivates the students to help each other.


[Participant 5]
And what language will you use? I mean for example in art history?


[Lavinia Bracci]
I mean the teacher guides the class in Italian, always in Italian, again we call ourselves a full-
immersion but we called ourselves at the beginning a gentle full-immersion but we can use English
only as a bridge language as Fiora was saying this morning. If there’s a moment when they don’t
manage to understand the teacher and they don’t manage to understand the teacher even if they
collaborate, that’s the second step, understanding the teacher or understanding the teacher as a
group. Ok. If that doesn’t happen at that point the teacher intervenes with English, with key words
for example no? and we slowly get there. Slowly during the first weeks but faster and faster as we
go on.


[Alfonso Diego Casella]
And then for example from our last group I tried taking away the figuratives for the first weeks, it
was a particular group and I could see they were going very slowly. So it depends on the people
everybody has a different process, learning process so I tried actually at the very beginning using
English, the first two classes, then I said oh you need to improve your Italian so then I started with
the power-points in English and speaking in Italian, and sometimes in English I’d explain
something that was a little bit difficult. And I realized they needed to work, now we are finishing
the course, and now they have to write the paper and they are really worried so we are arranging
some after class sessions to …


[Lavinia Bracci]
He has a class of all beginners and non service-learning students so they’re really working…


[Alfonso Casella]
They are really…they’ve actually improved a lot because in the beginning they didn’t understand
words, and were like oh my gosh European Union what’s that? You know? And once I remember I
was talking about Spinelli who is like the leader of the Federalist movement in Europe and Spinelli
actually means joint in Italian, so the student was like… and then I said hey what are you doing did
you smoke a Spinelli? And then he starts to laugh and now he’s one of the best students, wrote one
of the most ambitious papers…Michael. So I think it’s very important how you deal and how to
interact with them and now they are totally worried about the paper and of course they have a right
to be but we organized an after class session just to give some support in order not to translate
literally because it’s very easy when you don’t have a good base because it’s easier to think in
English and then translate into Italian, but I think they will be fine, we have found a compromise.
So they have enough literature in English but they’ll write the paper in Italian but mainly they get
the process of the Italian language in class.


[Lavinia Bracci]
And again, there is probably a big advantage in being a full-immersion they all live in host families.
Class in the end is not the worst part, it’s much harder to be in the Italian service-sites, it’s much
harder interacting with Italian piers from day one, so the content in class is another content but it’s
manageable.


[Nevin Brown]
Is it time to go?
I’ve lost track…