The Center of Inquiry also supported four internships that take Wabash students to Chiapas, Mexico, to work on service-learning projects for four weeks during Summer 2003. The internships include work with an indigenous theatre group, an environmental action non-governmental organization (NGO), a local language school and an indigenous photography project. Each internship has been tailored to the individual student’s educational and career goals. For the study, students will respond to pre- and post-experience surveys developed by us, and the faculty coordinator will write an essay reflecting on the educational benefits from his perspective.
We shall use the journals students are developing for the internship as their final project to assess what they have learned. Of particular interest with this program will be the service-learning orientation, which is not present in the other two projects. Off-campus study programs often highlight experiential learning as a major component of what they offer.
Our goals are to determine how service-learning—or experiential learning more generally—affects students’ perceptions of the study-abroad experience and how those effects relate to liberal arts education. These findings will contribute to future directions in researching the educational outcomes of service-learning, study abroad, and off-campus study in the context of liberal arts education. We also intend to explore whether programs that fully immerse students in a different culture have the unintended consequence of eliminating supportive learning communities. The findings from this study will be available during the next reporting period.