| John Goders: Links
to Learning
John Goders, professor of art,
contributed to a recently published book, Spheres
of Possibillity: Linking Service-Learning and the Visual
Arts, which was written by CSU Los Angeles professor
of visual arts Carol Jeffers. Jeffers and Goders were
a part of the same groundbreaking cohort of CSU professors
who received grants from the Getty Foundation as a
part of the CSU/Getty Linking Project. The grants allowed
the 12 professors at six regional CSUs – Dominguez
Hills, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Fullerton, Northridge,
and San Bernardino – to put the revolutionary
idea of community service learning into practice, where
students not only learn, but teach as well, and the
community-at-large benefits most.
Community service learning takes the idea of an internship
and turns it on its head by requiring college students
to not only learn through volunteering, but to then
provide some sort of instruction in the process. The
outcome is an endless cycle of teaching and learning
for all those involved.
“It’s that reciprocal
teaching and learning partnership that makes this so
unique,” says
Goders. Giving an example of the model, he describes
another professor involved in the program who sent
her students to community sites to build kilns. The
college students learned how to build the kilns and
then taught children at these sites how to operate
the kilns to make ceramics, which they will continue
to use. “The student is not only learning as
a passive recipient, but actively teaching as well,
and that, in turn, adds more to what they learn from
the experience. They’re learning to teach and
teaching at the same time.”
“I didn’t understand it at first,” he
says. “But I’ve always felt art would be
a vehicle for community outreach, and that is exactly
what this project was all about.”
Goders’ two-year project involved
60 future elementary teachers in Art 301, a popular
elective in the Liberal Studies program. Goders first
taught these students a variety of arts and crafts
projects focused on principles of composition and modes
of creative expression through collage, drawing, painting,
and sculpture projects. Along the way, he taught
them how to design and carry out such lesson plans
for children. Then, the students contacted local elementary
schools and conducted a lesson for a class of children
within the school. To complete the community service
learning circle, the ART 301 students then wrote final
reports that were compiled on a Website so that other
teachers in elementary schools around the world could
use the project notes and students’ insights
to develop their own art lesson plans.
The response to the program
was astounding, says Goders: “Every
one of my students came back with glowing reports.
This experience showed them the joy of teaching. As
future teachers, they suddenly understood first-hand
what it meant to give the gift of education. They said
the children all begged them to come back again because
they experienced the joy of the arts, and the elementary
school teachers were very grateful, too, since many
of them had not been trained how to teach the arts
so they’d avoided such lessons.”
“This program and community service learning
in general does more than just teach students and children.
It has some major life-affecting implications for everyone
involved,” he says. “It’s not just
job training, it’s also life training.”
Goders contributed to the book,
which served as the output of the 12 professors’ projects en masse,
through exit interviews conducted within the CSU cohort. He
remains involved with the Linking Project in an advisory
role, and though the program has ended, its influence
continues as a de facto form of “pay it forward”:
Some of Goders’ former students continue to volunteer-teach
such programs in schools within the community. And
the model of community service learning has developed
into a major field of pedagogical study, now offered
at some universities as its own stand-alone post-baccalaureate
degree.
-Ryan Brandt
|
