By Stephanie Schupska
University of
Georgia
Not all learning happens in a classroom. University of Georgia
students are finding this out through something called service-
learning, which takes students and professors beyond the
typical lecture and lab and into the community.
David Berle, a UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental
Sciences assistant professor, applies the concept in his
classes.
“The students learn out there what they would have [usually]
learned in a classroom,” he said. “There’s a disconnect when
you design. When you get out there, you realize things are hard
to do, and there are ramifications on what you do.”
Berle teaches a residential landscape design class for the UGA
School of Environmental Design and the CAES horticulture
department. This month, his students took part in “Hands On
Athens.” This multiagency program helps economically
disadvantaged homeowners whose houses have fallen into bad
repair.
Students in Berle’s class designed and installed new landscapes
for four families.
On Paris Street in Athens, Ga., homeowner William Barrow sat on
his front porch, a smile cracking through his wrinkles as he
watched Hands On Athens house captain Drane Wilkinson re-hang
his screen door. With plywood taking up space in his back yard
and concrete filling his front yard, he had some projects at
his home that, at 75, he couldn’t handle on his own. Through
Hands On Athens and Berle’s service-learning class, he got the
help he needed.
“This has given me a good idea of the construction side of
installing materials,” said Larry Brannen, one of Berle’s
students. “It’s a good thing to do to help others like this.”
Several students struggled to nail in a new screen, level and
build a new porch entrance and move dirt and rocks. The day
before they had taken sledgehammers to a deteriorating concrete
sidewalk in Barrow’s front yard.
Barrow has lived in his home for “about 20 years, I imagine,”
he said. His sister bought the house from his mother, and both
are deceased. He owns half of his home and “the other half is
going to my niece.”
At a different home, the floor was rotting in. In another, only
one electrical outlet was left working. Other groups helped fix
these problems while Berle’s class worked on the yards.
“It’s one of the more successful service-learning landscape
projects we do,” Berle said. That’s saying something, because
each of his classes has a service-learning part.
• In his introduction-to-horticulture course, which averages
300 students, he gives credit for a quiz score if students help
at other service-learning projects.
• During Maymester’s three-week term, he’s taking a class to
Sapelo Island to survey trees and plants, which will help the
dwindling historic community with a land management plan.
• He also teaches a one-hour special-problems class on
landscape Spanish. The students in this class cleaned out a
ravine, built a park and planted 175 trees at a predominately
Latino mobile home park.
• A previous class cataloged trees in the historic African-
American Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery in Athens. Another inventoried
community landmark trees in Athens-Clarke County.
Berle has been named one of UGA’s first five service-learning
fellows. The university began the fellow program to cultivate a
core group of campus leaders in service-learning, said Shannon
Wilder, coordinator of the UGA Office of Service-Learning, in a
UGA publication.
According to the UGA service-learning Web site
(www.servicelearning.uga.edu), service-learning applies
academic skills to address real-life needs through a
collaborative process between UGA and the community.
To Berle, service-learning integrates a course’s content with
activities that reinforce the course goals and objectives.
“It’s good for students to see a slightly different version of
the world,” he said. “It’s another way of doing something
instead of something else to do.”
(Stephanie Schupska is a news editor with the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
