The Pathways for Public Service and Community Engagement is an excellent tool to incorporate into the classroom. Please utilize any of these activities with your students.
Issue Mapping
INSTRUCTIONS
In this activity, students will identify a social issue they are passionate about (or one related to the course). Reflecting on that issue, they will identify activities to address the issue for each of the pathways.
For example, if the issue is Affordable Housing, a Direct Service activity could be to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity.
Afterwards, there should be some form of reflection or processing regarding their maps. This can be a written reflection or a classroom discussion.
This activity also works as a group activity. If there are multiple group members, you can instruct them to brainstorm multiple examples for each pathway or have them do extensive research on what has actually been done in the local community within each pathway.
MATERIALS
You can have students utilize the worksheet (linked below) or you could have them create a map on a flip chart paper. If completing this digitally, it is recommended to give the student a format to utilize.
Feel free to utilize the Issue Mapping Worksheet.
The worksheet is adapted from Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford, 2019.
What is Service? Activity
INSTRUCTIONS
Students will be given a list of engagement activities - you should instruct them to rank these items from most to least impactful. They will utilize this ranking to determine which pathway they align with. This is similar to the actual survey; however, it includes a different set of activities.
MATERIALS
Copies of the worksheet (either physically or a digital, editable version)
See our sample worksheet
Personal Reflection
INSTRUCTIONS
Have students reflect on their Pathways results. You will provide questions for them to ponder. This can be done as a written assignment or as a group activity. As a group activity, you could try the "Pair and Share" technique. This is when you ask students to form a group to process and then have each group share out to the larger class.
MATERIALS
None
SAMPLE REFLECTION QUESTIONS
- Explain your interpretation of their survey results.
- What is your attitude about community engagement and community service in general?
- Where there any surprises in the questionnaire results?
- How might you use the information gained to inform your choices while at George Mason?
- Do you have questions related to the survey or the areas of community engagement it references? If so, what are they?