Go Forth and Smolder
Site Background
For this study, our research site was the undergraduate Honors program and Class of 2019 at Santa Clara University (or SCU), with additional guidance and insight provided by Andrea Brewster.
Santa Clara University is located in Santa Clara, California, a midsize city in Silicon Valley. The city of Santa Clara is fairly wealthy, with an average income well above the California average, and a crime rate well below national average, but the University itself resides in a less affluent part of town (City-Data). Santa Clara is a Jesuit institution, and the oldest university in California, founded in 1851 with a traditional emphasis on the Jesuit mission of social justice (At a Glance). Its student body affiliates with a variety of religions, as evidenced by the variety of student religious groups on campus, however, we were unable to find precise statistics detailing the percentages of students identifying with each religion (Spiritual Life). For additional perspective on the purposes of the program and whether it is accomplishing its goals, we interviewed Dr. Andrea Brewster, the director of the ELSJ program, and referred to the Ignatian Center manual for teaching an ELSJ course.
According to Dr. Brewster, the ELSJ program was developed and implemented at SCU over 25 years ago in order to teach “competence, confidence, and compassion” and to help show the power of action to the students of Santa Clara University, essentially making it the realization of SCU’s mission and vision within the school’s core requirements. It has traditionally been grounded in two specific ideas: the continuation of Jesuit social teaching in the modern world, and on the efficacy of high impact practices, like community outreach, in affecting students’ worldviews (Brewster).
Methods
Additionally, we asked if the students would be willing to undergo a follow-up interview in order to give a more complete student perspective of the structure and success of ELSJ courses. The online survey was comprised of two primary portions, a series of five multiple choice questions, followed by five open answer questions. We intentionally avoided matrix style questions, as suggested by the University of Maryland’s guidelines for online survey design due to the risk that matrices would show up differently in different browsers (Online Survey Design Guide). Additionally, we followed the guidelines for survey design set out by Shelley Strowman by keeping our survey to a reasonably short length of 10 questions, organizing it into sections based on response type (Multiple Choice v Short Answer), and intentionally using closed/multiple choice responses for more personal questions (e.g. “How frequently do you volunteer or do community service?”) (Strowman). The first multiple choice question was used to partition the data into three distinct groups based on the number of ELSJ courses they had taken, with the response categories being 0 classes, 1 class, and 2 or more classes. The rest of the questions were each designed to correspond with a certain learning objective from the ELSJ learning objectives stated earlier, with one multiple choice question corresponding to the Civic Engagement goal, two multiple choice questions and an open answer question corresponding to the Social Justice goal, and one multiple choice question and two open answer questions corresponding to the Civic Life goal.
The interview portion of the project was less scripted, more to get a feel for the way people who have taken ELSJ courses think about them. The interview questions asked the student we interviewed about their experience in ELSJ classes and how that experience impacted their life. Finally we closed up each interview with the question, “Do you believe the ELSJ program is accomplishing its goals? Why or why not?” Followed by the question, “Do you have any suggestions for improvement?” Our goal with this format was to discern where students and faculty believed the ELSJ program was accomplishing its goals and where it was not as well as providing insight into its current shortcomings. A link to our survey can be found below.
Responses by Number of ELSJ Classes
0 ELSJ Classes
1 ELSJ Class
2 or More
Total
25
14
3
42
In order to collect our data, we emailed an online survey to the University Honors Program through the honors email lists, and posted a link to it on the Class of 2019 Facebook Page. In total, we recorded 42 responses to the survey, with the distribution of responses by number of ELSJ classes shown in the table below.