Also present at the meeting were John Strong, Elizabeth Burton, and Jan Bradley from the Citizenship and Service Learning (CASL) office.

The steering committee met at 10:00 a.m., Thursday, September 30th at the ADC office.

John Strong reported that the CASL office recently completed an assessment of service-learning at Missouri State University. Using a self-assessment rubric that has been widely used on other campuses, the assessment activities were done in the spring and summer of 2004. HLC committee members were provided with copies of the assessment rubric showing the results of the analysis. Divided into five main areas (or dimensions) for assessment, the rubric shows that Missouri State University is strongest in the areas of student awareness, community partnership, and administrative support, while needing to build strength in the areas of faculty awareness and involvement. The greatest weakness revealed by the assessment was the lack of a universal definition of service-learning. No two people seemed to have quite the same understanding of how it should be. In addressing this, they have been able to come up with a succinct, two- sentence definition that communicates the four main concepts behind service-learning. The definition will be incorporated into CASL materials and their web site. CASL has also set new goals for increasing faculty involvement with service-learning. Currently, 10% of Missouri State faculty utilize service-learning as a part of their teaching. The CASL goal is to reach 15% by the year 2008 and 20% by 2010. One factor which will help them attain this goal was the passing by the Faculty Senate in 2001 of integrated service-learning which allows service-learning involvement to be embedded into a regular class.

The HLC committee agreed that the CASL assessment, showing both student awareness and community involvement, will be a major supporting document for the Self-Study.

Bill reported that the majority of charges had been sent out to all departments, committees, offices, and services. The remainder should be out by next Monday.

The charges for Area Studies including Native American, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African American, Antiquities, and Gender Studies needed some additional revision and the committee had been asked to take a look at those. It was agreed that the same set of questions applies to all sections of Area Studies.

Next week is fall break, so the next meeting of the committee will be on Thursday, October 14.

Respectfully submitted,
Linda Rogers

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