Share this story.

Learning Through Service

Honors students combine education of the mind with giving of the heart

By Laura B. Raphael

---

Click Photo to Enlarge Working on writing projects in the library.

Click Photo to Enlarge A Marshall student gets some advice from an ORU "teacher."

Click Photo to Enlarge Students learn to create poetry.

Click Photo to Enlarge Aimee Raile reads the wolf's side of the story (as in The Three Little Pigs) as part of a character-building exercise.

Click Photo to Enlarge Honors scholar Joshua Bimat explains the properties of solids and liquids to a Marshall student.

Click Photo to Enlarge Honors fellow David Collins and a Marshall student mix up some "slime"--a combination of water and corn starch.

Click Photo to Enlarge Honors fellow Jared Buswell introduces two fledgling photographers to his video camera.

Watch out, Wordsworth... move over, Milton... you might have some Tulsa-bred competition for space in poetry anthologies pretty soon, thanks to an ambitious new service learning initiative at Oral Roberts University.

Approximately 30 ORU students in Honors English 101 and Honors English 305 participated in presenting poetry writing workshops for Marshall Elementary School students in late March... and the results were "impressive," according to one ORU student who helped organize the workshops.

"These students wrote poems about everyday things--pets, the park, the zoo--that were nonetheless very deep and profound, more profound than they realized in many cases," Alicia Wilkins, junior English Education major, said.

"We wanted to show them that writing can be fun and that they could be poets, too," Wilkins continued. "Judging by how excited they were and the quality of the poems, I think it was a success."

Funded through grants from the Bank of Oklahoma and the Temple Foundation and led by ORU professor Dr. Kay Meyers, this service learning project was one of several targeted to help improve the academic achievement of Marshall Elementary students in grades K through 5. Other service learning projects this spring included both developing and presenting workshops on character education and world civilizations. There was even some science, taught by students from ORU's two-year-old honors program. As honors fellow Aimee Raile explains, Marshall students "learned about the states of matter as well as the mixing of colors." This was accomplished through the creation of something called slime. Slime, a mixture of water and corn starch, Raile said, "has the properties of both a solid and a liquid."

Although ORU has been involved in community outreach programs throughout Tulsa almost since it first matriculated students in 1965, it did not include a formal community service curriculum woven into various classes until last fall.

Wilkins, for one, believes it is a positive change. "This way, more students have the opportunity to do community service," she said. "The classroom setting--doing this as part of your coursework--motivates students who would usually be too busy to get involved outside of class."