Faithful Service and Academic Instruction
by This is an article I wrote to explain to the faculty members about our program on faculty community involvement and service underscoring how service-learning can deepen the value of education as a tool to help address the needs of the communities.
I have personally perceived teachers as professionals who have firm hearts and minds of leaders. I say this because teaching takes good self and group leadership to strategically animate the interplay of expertise and creativity. In a word, this is competence.
Xavier, however, does not only invest in competence but also brings to the fore conscience and commitment. Thus, it does not only thrust quality teaching but also thrusts the apostolic use of this competence through a commitment to serve the poor and the marginalized. To extract thoughts from Fr Pedro Arrupe in his article, Person for Others:
Today our prime educational objective must be to form men-and-women-for-others; men and women who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ – for the God-man who lived and died for all the world; men and women who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men and women completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce.
It is in this principle that the university students, with the faculty taking the lead, are invoked to see more deeply the association between education and the real needs and challenges of society, to dig more profoundly into situations and to look beyond the familiar and the comfort zones.
KKP’s Faculty Community Involvement component modestly explores, studies, and designs venues and opportunities where the social involvement office can meaningfully partner with faculty in a common goal to respond to societal needs. This endeavor is being anchored to KKP’s Service Learning Program where both faculty and students can bring their expertise to respond to where the greater need is. Some of the support activities that KKP provide to faculty members who make use of the service learning pedagogy in their cases include the following.
Faculty Colloquium Series
KKP facilitates four colloquium series for faculty in a school-year. The themes include faith and social justice, reflection, community organizing, interdisciplinary projects, and others. The colloquium series aim to target the deepening of the expertise in the engagement.
Social Exposures
The social exposures are trips to the partner communities and institutions that the faculty and students will be rendering their community service. This is an opportunity for the faculty to be able to interact with the community and identify their real needs and with agencies where they can identify existing interventions. In this manner, the faculty may be able to identify define their discipline’s interventions.
Basic Orientation and Processing Sessions
The BOS and the Processing Sessions are conducted at the beginning and at the end of the engagement, respectively. The goal of these activities is to contextualize and deepen the social engagement. Included in these are reflection sessions.
Dialogues Publication
The Dialogues Publication also is opens space for sharing of articles from students and faculty who want to share their thoughts, insights, and or academic output from their community engagement.
Other support activities include workshops, skills training, consultations and meetings, and sharing of community output to the XU community.
Faculty community involvement through service learning is hoped to be a realization of what is central to Jesuit education, an education that has an eye that is open to societal events and with a heart that is sensitive to responding to the needs of society. To quote a fragment from the Characteristics of Jesuit Education:
…of greater importance is the examination of the justice dimension always present in every course taught.Teachers try to become more conscious of this dimension, so that they can provide students with the intellectual, moral and spiritual formation that will enable them to make a commitment to service – that will make them agents of change. The curriculum includes a critical analysis of society, adapted to the age level of the students; the outlines of a solution that is in line with Christian principles is a part of this analysis. The reference points are the Word of God, church teachings, and human science.
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