When Jimmy Fanuele began taking college engineering classes as a first-year, he didn’t expect students at a local elementary school to fundamentally shape his perspective on engineering. This notion changed when he took his first service-learning class.
Fanuele, a rising third-year civil engineering major, is one of many Northeastern students that have taken a service-learning course while completing their undergraduate degree.
In service-learning courses, students volunteer with community partners and gain hands-on experience, often spending time at local community centers, non-profits and public schools. Some of the activities can include afterschool tutoring with kids, elderly care support and aid navigating the healthcare system.
Fanuele’s first service-learning course, “Cornerstone of Engineering,” brought him to the fourth and fifth grade classrooms of an elementary school in Revere, Mass., where his team worked on designing STEM projects with the students on topics like water filters and toothpick bridges.
“You’re not building for yourself, but you’re building for communities and for people who maybe have different experiences and have different wants. It helped me take away my own personal bias in anything I’m doing and understand what’s being requested by others,” said Fanuele.
Jackson Jirard, associate director of Northeastern’s Community-Engaged Teaching and Research team, or CETR, told the audience at the group’s annual Publicly Engaged Scholar-in-Residence symposium March 20 that approximately 30% of Northeastern students complete at least one service-learning course before graduation.
In Faunele’s Cornerstone of Engineering class, taught by Kathryn Schulte Grahame, a teaching professor in the College of Engineering, he said the course showed him the value of a “mutually beneficial partnership. I really saw that come to life — I learned so much from fourth and fifth-grade students.”
Lori Gardinier, director and teaching professor of human services, teaches multiple sections of “Social Change and Human Services,” one of the required service-learning classes for the human services major. Some of the community organizations she has partnered with include substance abuse disorder center The Phoenix, a local nonprofit organization focused on supporting older adults called Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly and 826 Boston, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for K-12 students.
“Service-learning courses are opportunities for students to engage with the course concepts in real-world partnerships through roles that are defined by the community partners and align with the learning objectives of the course,” Gardinier said.
For Gardinier, the skills her students develop outside of the classroom with community partners can be just as, if not more, valuable than the skills they gain from lectures or textbooks.
“We consider a service-learning [like] a textbook or a reading. It is within the calculated time that a student should be dedicating out-of-class hours to meet the learning objectives,” Gardinier said.
Fanuele enjoyed his experience so much that now he is a service-learning teaching assistant, or S-LTA, and team manager, where he oversees six other S-LTAs. As an S-LTA for Cornerstone of Engineering, he assists students with Friendship Works’ medical escort program, where students accompany elders to their doctor’s appointments while observing accessibility issues to develop an engineering project.
“The best thing that service-learning does is connect you with community members in the Boston area,” Fanuele said. “I’m not from the Boston area, and it really helped me establish roots on the ground here.”
At the March 20 symposium, Jirard advocated for students to explore other service-learning opportunities in addition to co-op through research and other volunteering organizations on campus.
“Students are yearning for opportunities that shape ideals, not just capital. I think service-learning is now perfectly poised to supplement for students what co-op alone cannot,” Jirard said.
Gardinier said service-learning courses bridge the gap between theory and practice, offering students the opportunity to expand their experiential opportunities beyond co-op.
“One of the things I like to emphasize with students is [that] we deeply connect theory in practice — and that can’t just happen in co-op. It has to be embedded throughout your experience,” she said.
Caroline Munsell, a rising third-year human services and psychology combined major, took Gardinier’s “Social Change and Human Services” course, where she volunteered at Pine Street Inn, a nonprofit that supports people experiencing homelessness.
Once a week, she assisted with their technical literacy course under their workforce development team, helping people write resumes and apply for jobs.
As someone who wants to work in public policy, Munsell said her experience at Pine Street Inn prepared her for her current co-op at Victory Programs, whose clientele includes people experiencing homelessness.
“I just feel like for public policy its really important to have that human level understanding in order to ethically and responsibly try to influence policy that will directly impact people,” she said.
This past spring semester marked Fanuele’s third semester participating in service-learning courses. He said he cherishes forming dependable relationships that stem from giving back to the community.
“It’s having people that are there for you and people that you’re there for. It’s understanding that people’s experiences are different,” Fanuele said. “The relationships I’ve built myself with service-learning is what I value the most, and they’ll be relationships I’ll pursue for the rest of my life.”
