Scott Seider

Catalyzing a Commitment to Community Service in Emerging Adults

In this study, the author conducted in-depth interviews with college students from affluent suburban communities who perform 10 to 20 hours of community service each week. Three fourths of these students attribute their commitment to community service in large part to a single academic experience that influenced their respective worldviews and conceptions of service. Examples of such experiences include Bible studies, secondary and university-level courses, a freshman week orientation program, and independent study. For the majority of the students in this study, these experiences occurred during the freshman year of college. In this article, the author offers a model that documents the role of these experiences in catalyzing an emerging adults commitment to community service.

The Impact of Community Service Learning Upon the Expected Political Voice of Participating College Students

This study considered the impact of the SERVE Program at Ignatius University upon participating students’ expected political involvement. The SERVE Program is a community service learning program sponsored jointly by Ignatius University’s philosophy and theology departments. Through a mixed methods research design, the authors found that Ignatius University students participating in the SERVE Program demonstrated statistically significant increases in their expected political voice in comparison with peers in a control group. Qualitative interviews with SERVE participants revealed that the program increased students’ awareness of political and social issues; heightened their commitment to philanthropy; fostered their interest in pursuing socially responsible work; and strengthened their commitment to working for social change.

The Role of Privilege as Identity in Adolescents’ Beliefs About Homelessness, Opportunity, and Inequality:

This mixed methods study investigated the impact of learning about homelessness on the civic development of privileged adolescents. Pre—post surveys, classroom observations, and qualitative interviews revealed that the participating adolescents developed a more complex understanding of the factors that contribute to homelessness; however, this deeper understanding of homelessness was not accompanied by a reconfiguring of participants’ beliefs about America’s opportunity structure. Instead, this study’s privileged adolescents defended their own positions within the existing class structure by invoking legitimizing, and naturalizing ideological frames. This resistance to social justice content impeded participating teens’ development of civic responsibility for fellow citizens contending with poverty and homelessness.

Differential Outcomes for American College Students Engaged in Community Service-Learning Involving Youth and Adults.

The Serve Program at Ignatius University is a community service-learning program that combines academic study of philosophy with a year-long field-based project at one of approximately 50 different sites. Half of these projects entail working with youth, while the other half entail working with adults. This mixed methods analysis found that college students engaged in adult-oriented service demonstrated larger shifts in public service motivation and belief in a just world than their peers engaged in youth-oriented service. Qualitative interviews with participating students suggest that these differences may be due to the disparate expectations of participants who entered into their respective service experiences.

“Bad Things Could Happen” How Fear Impedes Social Responsibility in Privileged Adolescents

In this study, I compared the shifts in attitude of affluent high school seniors participating in a course on social justice issues to a control group of similar adolescents. In this course, participating adolescents learned about social justice issues such as homelessness, poverty, world hunger, and illegal immigration. An analysis of presurvey and postsurvey data revealed that the adolescents participating in the social justice course experienced a decline over the course of the semester in their support for educational equity between wealthy and poor communities. Interviews with these adolescents and analyses of their student work revealed that their shifts in attitude were influenced by fears about the possibility of one day becoming poor or homeless themselves.

Frame-Changing Experiences and the Freshman Year: Catalyzing a Commitment to Service-Work and Social Action

Interviews with college students committed to volunteer work reveal that a majority of these students can point to a single academic experience that deeply influenced their commitment. These experiences typically occur during the freshman year of college and alter the ‘frame’ through which these students view their community and/or their role within the community. Here, I offer a model demonstrating the role of these ‘frame-changing experiences’ in catalyzing a young adult’s commitment to service-work and social action.

The Effects of Privileging Moral or Performance Character Development in Urban Adolescents

This study compared the effects of emphasizing moral character development or performance character development at three high-performing, high-poverty urban middle schools. Performance character consists of the qualities that allow individuals to regulate their thoughts and actions in ways that support achievement in a particular endeavor. Moral character consists of the qualities relevant to striving for ethical behavior in one’s relationships with other individuals and communities. Using a quasi-experimental research design, the authors found that early adolescents attending a school emphasizing moral character development through ethical philosophy programming demonstrated significantly higher levels of integrity over the course of the 2010 to 2011 academic year than their peers at two matched comparison schools (N = 544). However, the early adolescents attending the comparison schools—which emphasized performance character development through advisory programming—demonstrated significantly higher levels of perseverance and community connectedness over the course of the academic year. These divergent outcomes across the three schools offer useful implications to educators, researchers, and policy-makers about the different effects of privileging a particular dimension of character education.

Engaging College Students from Diverse Backgrounds in Community Service Learning.

Community service learning at the university level is often conceived of as a mechanism for introducing privileged young adults to people with whom they have never interacted and experiences they have never had. American universities and courses involving community service learning are increasingly filling, however, with undergraduates who are members of the identity categories to which the community service learning experiences are intended to introduce them. The authors of this study consider the experiences of university students of color participating in a community service learning program.

The Influence of Parental Support on the Community Service Learning Experiences of American College Students.

This mixed methods study considered the relationship between the civic development of college students participating in the Serve Program at Ignatius University and the influence of these students’ parents. The Serve Program is a community service learning program that combines coursework in philosophy and theology with a year-long service project. Analyses of pre-post survey data revealed that students whose parents were highly supportive of their participation in the program demonstrated the greatest increases in public service motivation and expected political participation. Qualitative interviews with Serve participants revealed that highly supportive parents provided students with additional opportunities for reflection upon the readings, lectures and service projects they were encountering through the Serve Program.

Investigating Adolescents’ Critical Consciousness Development through a Character Framework

Brazilian philosopher-educator Paulo Freire defined critical consciousness as the ability to engage in reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. A growing body of research has found that critical consciousness is predictive of a number of important academic and civic outcomes in adolescents from oppressed groups. The present mixed methods study considered the critical consciousness development of 335 adolescents (57% female, 92% African American or Latinx) attending urban secondary schools that sought to foster their students’ critical consciousness, but featured five different pedagogical approaches. We hypothesized that considering these adolescents’ critical consciousness development through a character lens would highlight ways in which different schooling models contribute differentially to their students’ development of the intellectual, performance, and civic dimensions of critical consciousness. Longitudinal analyses revealed significant differences in the critical consciousness development of adolescents attending different schooling models along these dimensions. Interviews with adolescents and field work conducted at their schools offered insight into the programming and practices that may have contributed to these differences in students’ critical consciousness development.