The purveyors of popular culture frequently portray 20-somethings as couch-surfing freeloaders returning home after graduation to avoid the rigors of a merciless job market, unaware that many of the very real challenges today’s college-aged students face were created by previous generations, namely the crippling recession of 2008-2009. Aware of these obstacles, university scholars and administrators are descending from their ivory towers into the classrooms to empower students (who respond best to their names rather than to stock descriptions such as “millennials” or “Generation X, Y or Z”) by promoting student success, service-based assignments and self-reflective learning.
New initiatives, such as those sponsored by the John N. Gardner Institute, suggest that poor student performance (often identified by grade outcomes including traditional marks of “D” and “F,” as well as withdrawals and course incompletions) often begs the need for enhanced teaching as well as student accountability. Orienting new college students into intentionally created learning communities within their courses provides a social safety net for a shared educational experience rather leaving them to sink or swim in the artificially siloed environments of yesterday’s isolated classrooms.
Service-based learning now represents the cutting edge of meaningful learning assignments that find students and their faculty within the community, rather than on its fringes, offering rich experiences to the general public. Whereas the mantra at my institution, for example, has been the invitation “Enter to Learn,” followed by the valedictory at the end of four years, “Go forth to serve,” service-based learning has made that familiar charge the ethos of on-campus assignments that link transferable skills to visible needs in the community. A group of students at BYU, for example, created an installation on 21st-century urban challenges now on display at Provo Towne Centre. Farther afield, similar initiatives are afoot. At Villanova University, a graduate-level course created podcasts for visitors to the Philadelphia-area Woodlands Cemetery. A class at Florida A&M University undertook to write a history of a majority-black coastal community using oral histories. A similar initiative at Elon College in North Carolina rendered histories of African American Protestant communities near the university.
What all of these service-based assignments share is a commitment to helping students find purpose in the class as well as in the community. The well-known meaning-whisperer of the 20th-century, Viktor Frankl (author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”) identified three means to finding purpose. The first was through creative activities; the second, through recognizing the talents and virtues of fellow humans; and finally, choosing to find purpose (a “will to meaning”) in the face of difficulty often leads to purposeful living in and of itself. All of these find expression in this new service-based learning. Creativity finds expression outside of the classroom. Group work becomes a stage for appreciating the contributions of fellow students. Cultivation of positive attitudes throughout the university experience elevates attitudes in the face of scholarly challenges as well as those of normal life.
Finally, the new curriculum that is guiding students and faculty alike is self-reflective. Brian Jackson, BYU’s General Education Professor of the Year for 2019-2020, focuses much of his research and teaching on helping students to be mindful of their own writing practices in his English courses. This kind of “thinking about learning” is also known as “metacognition.” Increasingly, as students take time to actively reflect on why they write the way they do, consider how taking inventory of study habits might yield more effective learning, and talk to each other about how working with others might enhance collaborative efforts, the quality of their work on college campuses, not to mention in the world following graduation, cannot but improve.
Ultimately, today’s university students work within a world that promotes greater access to education but remains financially constrained by events such as the Great Recession and acute reductions in funding. Together, Utah’s students and faculty are working together under a new curricular banner that stresses student success, service-based learning and self-reflection. Hopefully, understanding their challenges and opportunities will assist us in welcoming them into 21st-century realities very different than those faced by previous generations.
Evan Ward is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University.