In Strengthening Your Personal Development through Community Engagement, Dr. Vanessa Arnaud emphasizes the importance of engaging in your community to enhance your personal growth. She states the CSU Chancellor’s Office’s definition of community engagement, which is “the collaboration between higher education institutions and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” She says that the best way to clarify your priorities or values in life is to put your assumptions and beliefs to the test; such as engaging in service learning to make connections between what you learned from your academic courses to the lessons you learn in your service experiences. She carries on further saying that service learning directly addresses often-raised student questions with research; which, according to Howard and Gordon shows better student academics and investments in the learning process when they work for a “large “real world” audience.” Arnaud provides theories from John Dewey and Jean Piaget to support her emphasis on the benefits of personal growth through engagement in your community. From both theories she introduces the experiential learning circle concluded by David Kolb. She also uses Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to further add support to her argument, connecting that students and instructors become equal participants in service learning, which has been shown to increase students’ academic successes, engagement in their studies, community, and university, and likelihood of staying in college. She listed the benefits of engaging in your community, such as: discovering the difference between subject matter and real-life experience and improving critical thinking through ability to connect theory to practice. Arnaud concludes that adding purpose to your actions through community service will make what you do more meaningful and therefore advance your personal development.
The reasons presented in Dr. Vanessa Arnaud’s article, Strengthening Your Personal Development through Community Engagement is very compelling. She has strong points to support her emphasis linking personal growth and community service. I found the most interesting topic that she discussed from her article to be the experiential learning circle. The four stages in the experiential learning circle are: observation and reflection, forming abstract concepts, testing in new situations, and concrete experience, which she points out, can be entered at any stage but all stages must be complete to have effective learning. I agree with her point about the experiential learning circle; however I do not think completing all the stages applies to every subject. My only critique about this article is that although statistics show students who engage in community service to be more successful in personal and academic wise, it does not address that not everyone is the same. Also there is no clear timing included in the article about when to start community service, when to end, or how long the learning process is. I can connect from other readings that it may be a whole lifetime for a person to fully complete their learning process, but it is not stated clearly in this article. Strengthening Your Personal Development through Community Engagement is another article pertaining to the importance of being involved in your community for higher success to yourself and to others.
Developing College Student by Virginia N. Gordon discusses the change of college students throughout their college years from two different theories concluded from personal interviews. Gordon starts her article by explaining the three phases of development from Professor William Perry of the University of Harvard. The three phases are: dualistic, multiplistic, and relativism. Then she explains the theory of Arthur Chickering which “suggests that students develop in an orderly way on many dimensions: intellectually, physically, psychologically, and socially.” Chickering also says that students go through several development tasks, called vectors which has a specific content, shows up at certain times in our life, and takes two to seven years to resolve. The seven developmental tasks that Chickering proposes are: achieving competence, managing emotions, moving through autonomy towards interdependence, develop mature interpersonal relationships, establishing identity, developing purpose, and developing integrity. I like both of the theories presented in Developing College Student by Virginia N. Gordon. I think the seven developmental tasks that are described by Arthur Chickering can directly relate to the three stages described from Professor William Perry. Both theories about the development of college students are similar and connected; as a student progress through one of the seven developmental tasks to another, they may be at the same time moving through one of the three stages also.