CONCLUSION

Our results answer our research question: indicating that the ELSJ program, as a whole, is not only failing to foster the stated learning goals of social justice, civic life, and civic engagement that it aims to instill in students, but when students take one and only one ELSJ course, they actually value social justice, civic life, and civic engagement less than they would if they had never taken the class at all. These results are surprising and alarming, but there is hope for the program. Those who take multiple courses within the ELSJ program actually benefit, and the learning goals of the program are fulfilled. Students who take multiple courses buy into the Jesuit mindset set forward by this program and seem to embrace it more so than those who have not had the same service experience in the community. However, as mentioned earlier, this could also be seen as the process of confronting and overcoming previously naive ideas of social justice in order to come to a more complete and mature understanding of the world. Current inefficiencies in the ELSJ core requirement cause the program to underutilize the powerful effects of service learning outlined earlier in our report. This is significant because service learning clearly has tremendous potential to transform its students, and not doing so is a significant loss. In the future, hopefully the University will be able to get its students to take more than one ELSJ course, but for now it appears that this trend will continue. While we have no doubt that these students are learning more about the circumstances and cultures of those around them, the ELSJ program as it currently stands fails to imbue the students with the sense of responsibility to do something about the challenges that their fellow humans face, and in doing so it fails the essence of the Jesuit mindset because simply knowing that someone is suffering is not enough. To truly embody the Jesuit ideal, we cannot just stand by and watch someone suffer, but take the resources we have and do something about it.

And reflection is not enough. As mentioned above, according to the ELSJ curriculum handbook distributed to each teacher “…CBL [Community Based Learning] facilitates academic goals, while coursework gives context to what students learn in the community” (Kelley 4) which suggests that current evaluations are measuring students’ academic performance about civic engagement rather than quantitative analysis of motivated action. Perhaps students are doing well academically, demonstrating an understanding of civic responsibility and engagement, thereby convincing facilitators of the program’s success. Our data, however, reveals this assumption falls short of reality. Despite a potentially more educated understanding, fewer students seem to be convinced that civic engagement at the present moment is important, essentially contradicting the learning outcomes of the ELSJ core requirement.

The curriculum handbook repeatedly mentions critical reflection as a primary learning outcome and desirable response from students. The handbook contains materials from Service-Learning Essentials: Questions, Answers, and Lessons Learned (Jacoby, Barbara, Jan 08, 2014). These authors quote the work of educational reformer John Dewey who writes that “‘Critical reflection is the active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends’ (1933, p. 9). While we wholeheartedly agree that this is an important response to service learning, if each ELSJ course considers this to be an ultimate success, it follows that there would be limited quantitative data or tangible evidence of civic engagement. This is further evidenced by a few brief phrases from students that took the ELSJ course. One student wrote, “Knows the life/experience of other people’s day to day life” another, “Necessary for growth” and another, “Enriching”. On opposite ends of the spectrum, one student wrote, “Liberal indoctrination” and another “It's necessary to escape the SCU bubble and to discover the problems our generation needs to tackle!” Unsurprisingly, respondents that had taken two or more ELSJ courses unanimously agreed that service is very important, which may well be the reason they are taking multiple ELSJ classes, rather than the other way around. With that in mind, it becomes easy to recognize that while students might better understand the complexity of civic engagement thanks their ELSJ course, it is unlikely that we will achieve our learning outcomes based on the current student attitude toward service.

In addition to this issue, we began to speculate about something far more concerning. We realized that it is highly unlikely that service would decrease community involvement and commitment to the common good. While the ELSJ was certainly not making radical improvements to student initiative, it did not explain why there would actually be a negative trend of involvement. Recently, we had the chance of sharing our desire to measure whether or not SCU empowers its students to “Go Forth and Set the World on Fire” this person laughed because it was, for some reason, foolish to think that could be a consistent and quantifiable objective. This example demonstrates our growing belief that the reason we saw student engagement decline was because by the time they had taken their ELSJ course, they had spent enough time at Santa Clara to be discouraged by the culture. We have yet to find ways of measuring this suspicion and it currently only stems from anecdotal experience but it would explain some of the immense challenges the ELSJ program faces in trying to inspire its students to actions. If we are correct, the program is effectively working against the cultural conditioning that does not integrate tangible forms of social justice and civic engagement into every other aspect of the school. While the words and goals look good on a brochure, it seems that the ELSJ core requirement has been given, consciously or unconsciously, the responsibility of transforming both students and campus culture to protect Jesuit ideals against the competitive self-interest that college seems to so often cultivate in young adults.

This transformation is too much to ask of a single course. We need a far more integrated commitment to social justice and the Jesuit learning objectives of the school. Students should believe that their lives have an impact in the world and that their education is actually helping them become more effective professionals for the sake of the common good. Similarly to the team behind the ELSJ program, we want our students engaged an eager to make a positive difference in the world. And, perhaps like those leading the program, we do not see how these goals are feasible without far more integration across the school.

In order to help solve this issue, we propose the four following solutions:

In line with the effective research done by Sanders, Van Oss, and McGeary, the ELSJ program can and should improve the structure of their reflection techniques. Sanders found that both personal growth and self-belief were significantly increased by writing specifically structured reflections which would be a measurable improvement to the more loosely structured reflections that the program currently uses.
According to the success studied by Chan Cheung-Ming, Lee, and Ma Hok Ka, each school should adopt the model of service-learning from Lingnan University. It has a clearly stated educational philosophy with measurable goals, a continuous quantitative evaluation system comprised of self-evaluation sheets filled out twice every semester by each student as well as daily service reflections, and program evaluations filled out by everyone from the instructors of the courses to members of the organizations within which the students served.
We encourage the administration and the ELSJ program team to remake their learning objectives so that they can more effectively measure and evaluate quantifiable, behavior-based data, rather than personal reflections.
We vigorously urge the administration to consider combining the mandatory C/I and ELSJ courses so that students can spend more time learning about the union of Jesuit ideals and technical education. This would also encourage faculty to better engage and measure the Jesuit values learned and implemented through a variety of subjects, rather than a sidekick to the core requirement.
1. We also vigorously urge the faculty and administration to model their educational evaluations of these new super courses with culmination projects much like the Senior Design Project so that students must design and physically implement a project proposal, rather than write about issue education. This project culmination has the dual benefit of evaluating tangible student behavior as well as creating projects that could have immediate value in the local and global community.

This entire project has been motivated by the desire to improve upon the central foundations of an institution we both admire. Santa Clara University is committed to the common good. We are excited that our data follows a trend of growing success in the field of value analysis and hope that our small contribution might, in some way, help stimulate the mission and vision of Santa Clara University.