SLS - The Story of Service-Learning at PolyU - Genesis 1b - CSLP

The community service activities at PolyU became more organised with the launching of the Community Service Learning Program (CSLP) in 2004, by the Student Affairs Office. In the beginning it collaborated mainly with academic departments in the health and social sciences: Nursing, Rehabilitation Sciences, Optometry and Radiography, and Applied Social Sciences, and units such as the Social Services Group in the Student Union. Gradually other academic departments became more active in the program.  

By 2010, it had grown into quite a sizeable and organised program, run by a Project Committee with representatives nominated by a large number of academic departments.  The highlight each year was the CSLP Award given to recognise the best projects.  In 2009-2010, 54 projects were nominated for the year-end awards, with 925 students serving a client population of 16,149.  About one-quarter of the projects were carried out under academic programs such as Work-Integrated Education, where student are required to undertake practical training in a professional setting.  But the majority of the projects were undertaken by the students voluntarily as extra-curricular activities.  

Some of the projects were quite impressive.  Mr. Joesph Lam of the Department of Land Survey and Geographic Information (LSGI) took 21 students to Linnan in northern Guangdong province.  Even though Guangdong was one of the richest  provinces in China, Linnan was a poor village in a remote mountainous area with little contact with the outside world.  There the team stayed at the Da Ping Zhen Niuluhui Primary School.  They paved the school playground with cement and organised a number of exciting learning activity for the students.  It was an eye opener for many PolyU students.  The LSGI team went on to develop ever more challenging projects, and subsequently created one of the more exciting credit-bearing SL subjects.  

An Applied Physics team organized a Community Weather Information Network.  They taught secondary school students the principles of Automatic Weather Station and the operation of portable device for measuring meteorological parameters in field surveys.   The project taught secondary school students basic weather knowledge, enhance their analytical skills, and build up their sense of responsibility towards the environment.  

A School of Optometry team, led by Dr. Chi-wai Doo, organised a variety of vision screening projects.  They served many different communities including many children, the elderly, mentally retarded, ethnic minorities, etc.  This was a big project, or rather many related projects organised over a long period of time.  There were many academic staff involved in training and supervising the students.  Many students were able to learn important practical skills through the project.  The project offered invaluable benefits to a very large number and variety of recipients. 

Another exemplary project was the Assistive Technology Development Initiative where a team of students from the Electronic and Information Engineering Department . led by Dr. C. K. Leung, designed and developed a range of assistive devices to help handicapped students in a special school to use computers, including enlarged buttons for students with difficulties in making precise motions with their hands and fingers. 

In yet another project, a team of students from different health care departments in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences jointly organized with the Xinyang Vocational Technical College an integrated health promotion activity in rural Henan province in central China. It provided environmental, health and nutritional assessment for more than 100 primary school students. 

A Biomedical Engineering team, led by Dr. M. S. Wong and Dr. Aaron Kwok, had been serving handicapped children in Guangdong province for many years.  They took measurements and moulds of the children’s limbs, came back to their workshops in Hong Kong to produce the needed prosthetics and orthotics, went back to Guangdong to fit the equipment for the children and train the children to use them properly.  A very challenging project with obviously a great impact on the lives of the children and their families.  Another exciting dimension of this project is collaboration with American Universities, who sent students to go with out students to Mainland China to work on the projects.  

Another team organized by Department of Computing took a team of 33 students to Cambodia.  Their project will be discussed in more detail in another section.  

Many of the projects, however, were small scale, involving a small number of students,  serving a small number of clients, and lasting a short period of time.  The impact or benefit were also uncertain or not very obvious.  

While the program encouraged quite a large number of students to engage in a variety of projects, there were nevertheless a number of issues encountered. Students often lost enthusiasm and failed to maintain momentum when they encountered other opportunities or when they were under academic pressure, such as approaching deadlines of assignments and at times of examinations. Often the projects started well but the momentum could not be sustained.  In addition, students were generally more interested in the action of providing service than the planning and preparation for the project, or reflecting on their experiences or following-up with needed support.  In those projects that were purely extra-curricular, the projects tend not to be very challenging, requiring little technical preparations.  In most projects that were not associated with an academic program, there were little or no rigorous reflection on the project.  As a result, it was not clear what has been learned.  Because students generally stay on campus for no more than 4 years, and they have multiple interests, it was very difficult to sustain a project for more than a year.  As a consequence, the students probably learned more about starting a project, rather than finishing it or sustaining it.  There was also very little passing-on of lessons learned to the next generation of students that came along.  Each generation of students have to re-learn how to put together a project, find partners, find funding, recruit members, ….  By the time they put together a project, often the momentum cannot be sustained and the project fizzled out.  

On the other hand, all the projects that were successful, making a significant impact on the community or the students, generally have a lot of input from academic staff.   The overall situation and underlying factors were considered in the brainstorming session conducted by VP(AD) and the subsequent discussions by the Task Force on Service-Learning in preparing the proposal for the Senate.  

As the new Service-Learning Requirement was approved, many of the teams and individuals active in the CSLP naturally started to put together proposals for SL subjects and projects.  They became the core people in the piloting and formal implementation of the new SL Requirement.  In summer 2011, there were 5 such pilot subjects offered to the students in the then 3-year undergraduate programs, as elective subjects.  

In 2010-11, we began to see a new type of projects in the competition for the yearend awards — there were several projects organised as part of pilot credit-bearing service-learning subjects alongside the many extra-curricular projects.  As the number of SL subjects increased each year, the number of such projects increased as well - some subjects carry out multiple projects.  Soon afterwards, it was decided that the role of the CSLP was already superceded by the credit-bearing Service-Learning Requirement.  Having fulfilled the historical mission to encourage student participation in community service, accumulating a significant pool of experience, nurturing a sizeable, loosely connected community of academics and students with interest in community service,  as foundation for the new SL Requirement, the CSLP was retired.