Greetings from data land with the Multi Institutional Study of Leadership results for my campus!
As my previous few posts have indicated, I’m strolling down a very long road with analyzing our rather large volume of data from this study. Some changes in our Institutional Research department on campus have left me with more of a role in managing this step of the process than I had planned, so this is a little more than what I expected!
As some of you know, the MSL is structured around assessing leadership as structured around the values of leadership in the Social Change Model. (read about the theoretical frame for the study on the NCLP website!) This model offers values of leadership based on individual, group, and community values.
We were investigating the specific results along one of the values that is essentially important to our campus, Citizenship. Our campus has invested a great deal of time and focus around building our commitment to a mission of service as indicated in our motto, “not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” I’m working with a graduate student on our campus this semester on a project relating to community service involvement of men on our campus, so I immediately went to that area and looking at gender differences.
Rather than digging in to this aspect of the data, my eye strayed over toward the opportunity to look at other areas of campus involvement in addition to prior involvement in community service. Instead, I went to look at the students who have cited prior involvement in campus programming organizations.
DING! DING! DING! We have a winner!
Students who cite prior involvement in programming organizations reported significantly higher results on Citizenship than our general student body. Their results are comparable to those from students who note prior community service involvement.
We knew this all along, didn’t we?! Or did we?
I know that our programming board students are always among the most selfless students that I have the pleasure of working with. I also know that their commitment to improving our campus has always been second-to-none after over 15 years of experience across a few institutions.
Knowing all of this, why have I never linked this to Citizenship before? Conversations about citizenship on our campus typically only include discussions of service activities outside of our campus boundaries and various forms of political activism. Yet, this study is telling me that the value of Citizenship is alive and well in our programming students to a comparable extent to our students involved in more typically termed “service” activities. I am really not saying that all groups of students are meeting a “need” that is even comparable, but our students working in all of these capacities are telling me they understand Citizenship in a different way than our general student body.
If our field is emphasizing a focus on student learning and we see that learning about Citizenship is happening in campus programming, is there any hope of expanding a definition of service to include campus-based service?
I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this one.