Community-based curriculum offers Sonoma State University advantages in at least three areas: citizenship education, cost, and cultural diversity.
1. Education for Responsible Citizenship
The principal value of community-based curriculum is that it gives students direct experience of complex contemporary social issues such as health care, homelessness poverty and economic insecurity, racism, violence, and ecological degradation. These are issues that must be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective."Hand-on" involvement gives students with a variety of primary learning styles the opportunity to engage important issues in terms of their persona academic strengths while encountering the relevance of several academic disciplines.It should also give students a deeper sense of the relevance of multiple disciplinary perspectives in making the kind of public policy choices that are the essence of engaged citizenship.
Community-based curriculum should significantly challenge students to use the basic reading, writing, speaking, and critical and creative thinking skills that are the hallmark of the liberal arts and sciences.Therefore, it is important for Sonoma State to offer a well designed freshman year liberal arts and sciences experience that provides students with a solid foundation in these skills.Community-based curriculum should be designed to build on that foundation.
Since the issues that concern the agencies that participate in community-based curriculum are generally interdisciplinary, that curriculum should be designed by interdisciplinary teams of faculty in collaboration with agency representatives,The Service-Learning paradigm offers many useful guidelines for curriculum design.
2. Cost Savings
1. Many community professional enjoy the opportunity to mentor able and receptive students.2. Students can provide direct services to agencies that justify the agency paying the cost of supervision.
Community-based curriculum can make a contribution to Sonoma State's diversity goals. Many barriers have been identified that stand in the way of increasing the participation of underrepresented cultural groups in the student body. While we are attempting to overcome these barriers, community-based curriculum can provide a range of opportunities for students to become involved with the many cultural groups in the Sonoma State service area. In the long run, these relationships could help build the bridges that are necessary to bring more representatives of underrepresented groups onto the campus.