Social problems class serves the poor
ENVISION Magazine, 2004

Last spring, undergraduate students in assistant professor Leda Nath’s social problems class were asked to unanimously identify one specific social problem as part of a new service-learning component. Her students then organized, and implemented a response to the social problem they chose.

The 51 students in Nath’s class identified “poverty” as the social problem they wanted to address, which culminated in a four-day drive for food, clothing and donations of money. During the course of the semester, each student helped prepare for the drive by creating flyers, placing ads in the Royal Purple, distributing posters on campus and manning a donation table in the University Center.

As a part of their class assignment, each student was required to work at the donation table for three hours during the drive held in April. In all, the class collected 400 nonperishable food items, 461 clothing items and $162 in cash. The food and half of the money was donated to the Whitewater Food Pantry; the clothing was designated to two area Goodwill depositories and two area Salvation Army locations; the remaining $80 was given to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Wisconsin.

At the end of the drive, students were required to write a reflection paper summarizing their thoughts about the project.

“I believe students were impacted in a positive way by this project,” Nath says. “Reading the reflection papers from the students was rewarding.”

Nath says she is amazed at the vigor in which her students attacked the servicelearning project.

“I want to emphasize that it really was the students who pulled together to make this happen,” says Nath. “They were amazing, organized, and really used their individual strengths to complement each other and make it happen.”

The project was the end result of receiving a $200 UW-Whitewater Service Learning Grant that Nath wrote with the help of two graduate students, Jackie Scola-Bernstein and Julie White. Nath’s service-learning component to her social problems class is slated to return again in fall 2004.– Tom Pattison