Service Learning

How do you teach English in a war zone? Bentley’s Robert E. McNulty seems to have found a way. Ready: Engage technology to link American students eager to teach with Afghan students eager to learn. Set: Add ingenuity, adaptability and persistence on both sides. Go: Let the curriculum evolve naturally from vocabulary to friendship.

The one-on-one tutoring program that McNulty devised offers language lessons via Skype, the Internet-based live-video service. For young Afghans, the education is critical.

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Sarah Benson ’11 grew up in Middletown, R.I., with a disabled family member who was a constant target for taunts and worse. It broke her heart, she says, and hurt her entire family. Today, Benson is on the front lines of an anti-bullying movement at Bentley that is helping to educate the local community.

“I’m passionate about this,” says Benson, pictured in the foreground, above. “We need to inform people and talk about how damaging bullying can be.”

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“The heart and soul of service–learning.” That’s how scores of colleagues describe Franklyn Salimbene, director of the Bentley Service–Learning Center (BSLC). Under his leadership, the center has notched many achievements and earned recognition by organizations such as U.S. News & World Report, the Princeton Review and the Carnegie Foundation.

 

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Playground construction became a lesson on service, as Bentley students traded laptops and books for wrenches and shovels on September 17 to join community partners to build a play space at Prospect Hill Terrace low-income housing development in Waltham, Mass. ...

In an earlier post, I wrote about unintended consequences that emerged from a bank’s well-meaning efforts to provide micro-loans to help people succeed in starting small businesses. “Outsider-ness” is a problem on many levels — and often right from the start.

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In one of the biggest initiatives the Bentley Service-Learning Center (BSLC) has tackled, Prospect Hill Terrace housing development will become the new home for a community center that will help the BSLC to continue to set national standards for town-gown partnerships. ...

For nearly two decades, Bill VanderClock, lecturer in computer information systems, has incorporated service-learning into his courses, sponsoring nearly 1,000 students in community-based work through embedded and fourth-credit course projects. His efforts were recently recognized with the Bentley Service-Learning Center Distinguished Faculty Award. ...

A team of Bentley undergraduate students headed to Captiol Hill to canvas congressional leaders about implementing a new “Energy 101” curriculum aimed at teaching basic energy principles at U.S. colleges and universities. ...

A service-learning faculty award to Michael Goldberg (Information Design and Corporate Communication) will establish a full-service graphic design business to serve nonprofit organizations, as a fourth-credit practicum for qualified students in his courses. ...

Service initiatives on anti-bullying, mental health, afterschool programs, and housing earned accolades for Bentley. For the seventh year, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) named Bentley University to the President's 2013 Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. ...