Penn ranks No. 1 in service-learning poll

While many members of the Penn community have been focusing on the University's No. 4 spot in the recent U.S. News and World Report college rankings, another ranking has gone largely unnoticed.

Penn was ranked by the magazine as No. 1 in service-learning, sharing the title with Stanford University and Berea College in Kentucky -- an almost entirely service-based school.

For the purposes of the survey, published this year for the first time, U.S. News defined service-learning as academic programs in which "volunteering in the community is an instructional strategy -- a requirement of a student's coursework. The service informs what happens in class, and vice versa."

The honor coincides with the 10th anniversary of Penn's Center for Community Partnerships. The office, which is located across from the Penn Bookstore on 36th and Walnut streets, was created to better incorporate Penn into the surrounding West Philadelphia community by using community service as a vehicle.

Center Director Ira Harkavy said he feels that the ranking was a validation of the decade of work that the people involved with the Center and its classes have invested.

"I couldn't be more pleased with this recognition," Harkavy said. "It is testimony to the hard, creative work of Penn students, faculty and staff and their community and school partners."

That work has created more than 120 Penn courses in numerous departments of both undergraduate and graduate schools which are categorized as Academically-based Community Service courses.

Earth and Environmental Science Department Chairman Robert Giegengack designed some of those courses.

Giegengack's courses are designed to confront major environmental hazards that children in the West Philadelphia community face today -- namely tobacco, lead poisoning and asthma.

Students in the courses learn about the problems and their environmental triggers, and then take that knowledge into the community. Penn students have taught classes on these subjects in churches, community centers and schools.

And while Philadelphia families will learn from the health education, Giegengack says the Penn students are also beneficiaries.

"They have the opportunity to take what they know and feel good about what they pass on," Giegengack said. "We have this little spark of altruism deep in us somewhere. This allows us to exercise that in a very satisfying way.

"If you help some family improve the health of their kids... Penn kids are all smart enough to realize that this has lasting value."

Brianne Donohue, a research assistant and former student of Giegengack's, echoed the professor's sentiments.

"I think it's great," Donohue said. "It's one thing to take a class and learn about it, but it's an entirely different thing to be working with the kids. I think it's really important, especially because Penn didn't have a great history with the West Philly community earlier."

Other ABCS classes range across all disciplines, and include courses that involve learning about Plato by teaching Plato's Republic to high school students, studying job training and presenting these ideas to community members, developing educational curricula in partnership with area teachers and nutritional initiatives to develop in-house vegetable and fruit gardens within the community.

While participants agree that through the Center great strides have been made in the right direction, Harkavy insists that this is only the beginning.

"We're actually doing what Benjamin Franklin said Penn should do," Harkavy said. "The key issue is that Penn's role is to help young people develop their morality and the inclination to serve. We can, together, do more and do better."

The Center hopes to inspire the integration of the surrounding community into the arts, sciences and other areas, as well as to help other institutions of higher education follow Penn's lead.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.