Service-learning enables faculty, students and community partners to collaborate on projects that extend student learning, provide volunteer help for community endeavors and help UAB advance its mission to support and improve the community.

During the past year, 11 faculty have worked together to create new service-learning courses or to integrate components in existing courses. Martha Earwood of Justice Sciences is one of them.

Connections and Corrections

Martha Earwood, who has never taught a service-learning course, was concerned about tackling such a unique pedagogy without support from those with experience. She said she learned the most through collaboration with the other fellows.

“Hearing the stories from other faculty who have been successful motivated me to pursue the development of my own course,” Earwood said. “I now have a list of other professors who are experienced and creative to whom I can reach out.”

In Earwood’s new Community Corrections course, students will research community supervision of criminal offenders, observe the process of parole decision-making and — through a partnership with Aid to Inmate Mothers — will help incarcerated women maintain a relationship with their children by recording video messages for them.

“I think this is going to be a terrific service-learning course because Martha is going to give students a chance to research what’s going on now with the prison system, explore ways to help reintegrate female prisoners into society and meet and help these inmates maintain a relationship with their children,” Vaughan said.

It also fulfills one of the most important elements in a service-learning course — an opportunity for critical reflection.

“Students need the chance to talk to and learn from their peers as the project is ongoing,” Vaughan said. “They need to be able to connect the project with what they are learning in the classroom.”

Earwood said the course also will help her students understand the immediacy of the problems the prison system faces.

“The most poignant goal is for students to evaluate their own perceptions of criminal offenders in the community as probationers and parolees,” Earwood said. “Alabama is facing an enormous crisis in criminal sentencing and prison reform. In the immediate future, there will be more convicted criminals living in our neighborhoods than ever before. I hope my students will be able to differentiate stereotypes from realities of those who have broken the law in our society.”