SLS-3c2 The First 4YUG Cohort - Learning Trip to the USA - University of Pennsylvania

Our next stop was University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia on the East Coast of USA.  In 1985, 4 undergraduate students proposed a after-school program at a local elementary school for their honours seminar class, which grew into the idea of the university-assisted community school.  In 1992 the Center for Community Partnerships was formed to direct this effort.  In 2007, the Center was renamed the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships.  

At the core of the Netter Center’s work is Academically Based Community Service (ABCS).  ABCS students and faculty work with West Philadelphia public schools, communities of faith, and community organisations to help solve critical campus and community problems in a variety of areas such as the environment, health, arts and education.  Penn acts as an “anchor institution” to improve their local communities and help solve significant urban problems.  The Anchor Institutions Task Force (AITF) is a network of 700 individual members promoting the engagement of anchor institutions.  

To see first hand how ABCS works, we were taken to one of the school just a few blocks from the Penn campus in West Philadelphia, where Penn students serve. This is the first time we visit a school where students have to pass through metal detectors to enter their school.  For example, Penn students would come to a school as an intern to read to elementary students, assist the school teachers in preparing for lessons, …, and to carry out so many other projects.  

 

The PolyU team also visited the School of Engineering at Penn.  Penn Engineering runs a number of impressive Local and Global service-learning programs.  A team from Penn had actually been collaborating with a team from PolyU’s Biomedical Engineering Department for a number of years by then.  The joint PolyU-Penn team has been going to southern China to serve handicapped children.  The team would go to take measurements for the handicapped children, come back to PolyU to design and manufacture orthotics devices in their laboratory at PolyU, and make a return trip to fit the devices for the handicapped children.  On this visit, the PolyU team exchanged views with associate dean Joseph Sun of Engineering and explored possible further collaboration.  A number of years later a joint team was sent to Rwanda to work on an information technology project.  Joseph Sun remains a good friend and collaborator even after he left Penn for other universities.  

It is at Penn when we began to appreciate there seems to be a social science - applied science divide in the world of service-learning.  Penn is a big university, with 4 undergraduate schools, 12 graduate and professional schools, 4,000+ staff and 22,000 students.  The work centred around the Netter Center seemed to be mainly in social science and humanities disciplines.  At the same time, Engineering operates its own set of service-learning courses and projects.  Later, we observe a similar divide at other universities as well as the cross-university level.  There are service-learning conferences that involve mainly social science and humanities, and there are also service-learning conferences that involve mainly engineering.  At the PolyU, however, we believe and learned from experience that there are lots of potential for cross-discipline synergy, and are determined to bringing multiple disciplines together for the same community.  A real world community’s problems are usually multi-facetted: education, jobs, skills, health, housing, …  And solutions even for a single issue often require multi-disciplinary skills.  For example, to build a successful community learning centre may involve construction, information technology, building services, teaching resources, public health promotion, financing, …