Since 1997, service-learning at Missouri State University has been an integral part of the public affairs mission. It is one of the primary pathways by which our campus engages with the community. As a high-impact teaching method, service-learning connects students, teachers and community partners, who work together to address social issues.

During that first year of service-learning programming, 57 students participated. Today, 7,000–8,000 students participate in service-learning courses each year, and data suggests that these courses have a positive impact on retention.

Service-learning is supported by the office of citizenship and service-learning (CASL), led by Dr. Katherine Nordyke, who has served as director since 2012 and published three books on the subject.

Nordyke shared how — as students continue to seek career-focused preparation — CASL offers several modes dedicated to connecting professional, cross-disciplinary experience with service in our community.

Service-learning and Campus Culture

CASL supports more than 150 community partnerships with organizations across southwest Missouri. We maintain relationships with many partners to ensure that students have a wide range of opportunities, and we also prioritize partners that are addressing emerging issues identified in the Community Focus Report (a partnership of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, the Junior League of Springfield, the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, the Springfield-Greene County Library District and United Way of the Ozarks).

Program Examples

• Springfield Community Gardens, where students who are interested in agriculture, natural environment sciences and health care sciences serve at a network of gardens across the city — helping to alleviate hunger and promote good nutrition.
• James River Basin, which is dedicated to protecting waterways, provides opportunities for students to work on conservation-focused event coordination, grant management and fundraising.
• Women’s Medical Respite, where women who are experiencing illness and homelessness can get back on their feet and move in a safer direction, allows students to participate in social work, psychology, housing and public safety initiatives.

New Partnerships

Some of CASL’s most recently developed partnerships include:

• Working on data collection with the Springfield-Greene County Health Department on SAVE (Springfield Area Vape Education), a vape prevention project.
• A national partnership with the American Red Cross, which allows service-learning students to work directly on public health issues.

“Service-learning is driven by people doing great things.”

—Dr. Katherine Nordyke

A Milestone in Vision Screening

In the past 10 years, Missouri State’s Vision Screening Program has given more than 100,000 total vision screenings. It’s also given many service-learning students (whose focus is health care delivery or access to education) a chance to work in person with patients aged 6 months and up. Using high-tech screening cameras, students conduct free vision screenings for children at daycares and schools and also at community organizations, including ones that serve adults and veterans who are often homeless; within moments, patients receive an “all-clear” or a referral to a vision clinic for follow-up care.

Chronic vision issues are best mitigated early on in a person’s life, so it’s no surprise that CASL’s partner organizations continue to request this service every semester — a sign of its value for their community members. In 2020, the Community Partnership of the Ozarks Alliance to End Homelessness recognized the Vision Screening Program as the Homeless Advocacy Recipient for Collaboration, Compassion and Generosity in Meeting Basic Needs for People Experiencing Homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re proud of the work our Missouri State service-learners have accomplished throughout the years, supporting health and education across the Ozarks.

Service-learning’s Impact on Faculty and Students

“Service-learning is driven by people doing great things,” Nordyke says. It regularly provides pathways to faculty and students who are interested in developing their professional skills with career-based experiences under real-world applications.

A few examples around campus:

• Lori Rogers, senior instructor of English, successfully trialed “agentic service-learning” to increase student engagement and retention in her English graduate and professional preparatory class. This approach, Rogers says, gives students a chance to take a proactive approach to service. “The student is really taking agency of the research, the proposals — identifying needs and developing their own solutions,” she says. Recently, a number of her students had projects featured at a National Conference of Undergraduate Research event.
• Jennifer Lowenthal-Hershey, instructor of information technology and cybersecurity, continues to draw outstanding community-driven work from business students in a service-learning course that bases projects on issues identified in the Community Focus Report. These outcomes include a group that recently worked to leverage data in addressing childhood trauma.
• Dr. Billie Follensbee, professor of art and design, expertly weaves service-learning principles into her course work, giving service-learners outstanding opportunities to interact with real-life historical art and artifacts — a key, career-oriented benefit for students in art and museum studies programs.
• A theatre major/Spanish minor self-published her children’s book as she partnered with the National Literacy Project through a 1-credit service-learning course.
• A service-learning student’s love of food and cooking ultimately led to full-time employment at Springfield Community Gardens (SCG). The team at SCG was impressed by her knowledge of agriculture and biology — part of the curriculum she studied in the environmental plant science program.
• The Gillioz Center for Arts and Entertainment offered one of its in-demand internships to a service-learning student in entertainment management. The Gillioz leadership was drawn to the industry knowledge he brought to the internship — something the student credits to his course work at Missouri State.
• A student entering the physician assistant studies program credits his variety of experiences with service-learning and community engagement with making him more marketable as an employee in future career endeavors.

“The student is really taking agency of the research, the proposals — identifying needs and developing their own solutions.”

—Lori Rogers

Ways to Engage with the Service-learning Office

• Nordyke and Mary Ann Wood, director of public affairs support, have co-led several cycles of the selective Carnegie Community Engagement Classification certification process. Earning this classification is one of the ways that Missouri State is recognized as a leader in community engagement practices, and it requires mountains of data and many pages of narrative explanation that document the university’s activities. Missouri State is one of only 357 colleges and universities to receive this classification. Nordyke and Wood are currently working on the next certification cycle.
• The eJournal of Public Affairs has always been a close partner to CASL. Service-learning lent personnel and operational resources for more than nine years as it collaborated in publishing nearly 30 issues and 100 articles and editorials on topics like voter engagement, higher education’s responsibility to sustainability, domestic violence and volunteerism. Now, CASL is proud to continue support for the eJournal with in-house operations and publishing.
• In 2020, a team of marketing students began the Fuse Campaign. It was designed to help people navigate polarizing conversations through card games and podcasts. Their work had such impact that the project earned a Department of Homeland Security grant. In July 2023, CASL assumed operational control and built a team of 14 faculty, staff and community partners to carry on the campaign. Since then, CASL’s version of Fuse has implemented the card game in 81 course sections (reaching 1,585 students), recruited 15 additional faculty and staff, recruited 22 teaching graduate assistants and engaged 200 individuals in and around the campus community with workshops, podcast episodes, live performances and toolkit development.
• A partnership with AmeriCorps to support healthy futures on campus and in our community gave CASL the opportunity to expand its reach with the Vision Screening Program. We not only went further and offered more opportunities to local organizations; we also offered AmeriCorps Membership opportunities to two dozen Missouri State students.

“These programs model the idea that giving something back to the community is an important college outcome, and that working with community partners is good preparation for citizenship, work and life,” Nordyke says.

If you are interested in contributing to these or other service-learning opportunities, please visit  CASL’s website or reach out to ServiceLearning@MissouriState.edu.

Around Campus…

The academic realignment process called for the creation of schools, with the goal of providing more multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborative opportunities.

Recently, five of these schools received new names. They are:

• The School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability (formerly the department of geography, geology and planning). This change took effect November 1.
• The School of Agricultural Science and Conservation (housing the animal science, equine science, pre-veterinary, environmental plant science, natural resources and wildlife conservation and management programs). This change will take effect January 4.
• The School of Hospitality and Agricultural Leadership (housing the hospitality leadership, agribusiness, agriculture education and agricultural communications programs). This change will take effect January 4.
• The School of Health Care Professions (housing the athletic training, audiology, occupational therapy, physician assistant studies, physical therapy, RStats and speech-language pathology programs, plus the communication sciences and disorders undergraduate program). This change will take effect July 1.
• The School of Health Sciences (housing the dietetics and nutrition, health services, sports medicine, recreation, physical education, exercise and movement sciences, biomedical sciences and public health programs). This change will take effect July 1.