Aggie Collaboration Program

Texas A&M University

For Faculty

Faculty Participants

Opportunities

The Aggie Service Program provides opportunities for faculty.

  • Teach a Service Learning Course: Use infrastructure, periodic evaluation, and persistent community ties to launch and support your service learning course
  • Develop a new Service Leadership Program: The ability to create new tracks provides opportunities to support degree programs, centers, and institutes, and schools that include community outreach and service.
  • Write a grant: With professional development, student recruitment, program evaluation, reporting, and grant writing support infrastructure if the sister program (Aggie Research Program), our program leadership will help you prepare your grants and help administer them.

Preliminary Service Leadership Programs

The Aggie Service Program has already identified faculty serving as Directors of different Service Learning Programs:

  • Public Health Service Leadership Program
  • Food Security Service Leadership Program
  • Health Disparities Service Leadership Program
  • Education Service Leadership Program
  • Juvenile Justice Service Leadership Program

Unmet Needs Driving Creation of the Aggie Service Program

First, the dearth of leadership and service opportunities limit students’ ability experience authentic Leadership and Selfless Service. Second, faculty lack support for developing and maintaining community partnerships required for service-learning courses or incorporation of “the Aggie Experience” into cultural discourse courses. Third, the needs of community partners are rarely satisfied in 14 weeks, and community partnerships suffer from the transient nature of tenuous connections hinging on particular faculty members or students. This program is based on the insight that it takes a sustainable, diverse community of Texas A&M faculty and students to transform these unmet needs into opportunities.

Support for High Impact Learning Practices

The Aggie Service Program is envisioned as a learning environment that simultaneously incorporates four high-impact learning experiences: 1) learning communities, 2) collaborative projects, 3) diversity learning, and 4) service learning. It is based on the highly interdisciplinary structure of the Aggie Research Program, a Tier-One Program that serves over 1,000 students a year. Briefly, graduate students or advanced undergraduates seeking leadership opportunities act as Aggie Service Leaders mentoring a multidisciplinary team of undergraduate Aggie Service Scholars seeking service opportunities. “Faculty Directors” guide the professional development of team leaders who in turn cultivate community partnerships and civic competencies of their team. By integrating leadership, service, and education, this program promotes the creation of long-term, mutually-beneficial partnerships among teams of Aggies and their community partners. Participation is open to Texas A&M students at all academic levels and disciplines and is guided by a structure implementing a pedagogical approach grounded on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role of Aggie Service Leaders

Aggie Service Leaders of an interdisciplinary service team engage with community partners in a collaborative service project. They benefit from recruiting diverse student members with complementary majors, talents, skills, and backgrounds, as well as overlapping membership of the communities to be served. Because service projects and community partnerships can last years, underclassmen are recruited to replace graduating seniors. Understanding the need for continual support, structured reflection, and peer- mentoring, Service Leaders participate in periodic Service Leader Meetings facilitated by faculty Directors and apply insights from their disparate disciplines and lived experiences to address challenges they face leading teams and maintaining community partnerships. Service Leaders form a community of practice to collaborate on innovating leadership and engagement strategies, overcoming challenges, and developing best practices. The Aggie Service Program thus acts as a professional development program that support Aggie Service Leaders developing innovative and creative teaching and learning components to cultivate the civic competencies of their teams.

Role of Aggie Service Scholars

Aggie Service Scholars engage in a collaborative service project in interdisciplinary teams led by an experienced Service Leader. Rather than traditional service-learning models that are limited by the perspectives of a single discipline (inadvertently reinforcing deficit models), Service Scholars benefit from working with members with different disciplinary perspectives, as well as diverse talents, skills, and lived experiences. Those who develop a passion for service can participate multiple semesters, taking on greater responsibility for mentoring new team members, and eventually transitioning to team leadership. By continually recruiting members with critical complementary perspectives, service experiences are explicitly structured around asset models. The Aggie Service Program thus acts as a service-learning program that supports Aggie Service Scholars engaging in a meaningful interdisciplinary approaches to solve real-world problems.

Role of Aggie Service Leadership Directors

Aggie Service Leadership Program Directors cultivate a scholarly community of practice consisting of multidisciplinary groups of Service Leaders. Directors will be recruited from faculty from diverse disciplines, who will leverage their own experiences teaching and cultivating community partnerships. Besides facilitating Service Leader Meetings (serving as focus groups), they have access to extensive formative and summative data from Service Leaders and Scholars. To empower faculty and elevate their often-unrecognized service contributions, all faculty participants will be designated as co-Directors of the Aggie Service Program. They will leverage their embedded positions to work on collaborative projects including 1) manuscript preparation, 2) grant-writing, and 3) program development. The Aggie Service Program thus acts as an education incubator that supports faculty making important contributions to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Learning Outcomes, Objectives, and Modes of Assessment 

Five mechanisms of data collection will be leveraged, and each form of assessment is required to earn distinction as an Aggie Service Scholar, and Aggie Service Leader, or Director: 1) common intake and exit surveys, 2) weekly progress reports by Aggie Service Scholars and Aggie Service Leaders, 3) monthly Service Leader meetings serving as focus groups, 4) end-semester Service Learning Reports (Aggie Service Scholars), Best Practices Reports (Aggie Service Leaders), Service Evaluations (Community Partners) and Program Evaluations (Directors). The burden of formative and summative assessment of learning outcomes is transformed into learning and scholarship opportunities. Team Leaders receive data aggregated from their team members’ weekly progress reports, as well as review their team members’ Service-Learning Report and the Service Evaluations at the end of the semester. Data from weekly survey reports is also aggregated from across multiple teams and is shared at monthly Team Leader Meetings. Directors review Best Practice Reports and data from entrance and exit surveys. All data will be subject to IRB protocols and managed centrally by a dedicated administrator to ensure FERPA and research compliance.

Learning Objectives for Aggie Service Leaders 

We will apply the learning objectives based on the curriculum developed by the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (cirtl.org), based on the three pillars of Learning Communities, Learning-Through-Diversity, and Teaching-As- Research. We will expand our partnership with CIRTL@TAMU to develop a Best Practice Report template that address specific learning objectives:
1. Describe the importance and process of identifying a community partner and working with them to guide the team leader’s project creation.
2. Identify and articulate their values and skill sets for the purpose of sufficiently matching their service efforts to the needs of the community partner.
3. Create a service project structure–including goals, timeline, and expectations–that matches the community partner’s needs and is explicitly anti-paternalistic.
4. Identify and recruit a team of service students with appropriate maturity, skills, and temperament for the service project.
5. Manage their service team members to ensure a high standard of work and engagement, the expectations for which are informed by the community partner and articulated to the team members.
6. Critically analyze their role as a service team leader through an intersectional lens that interrogates the potential biases of service activities.
7. Reflect on their experience and relate the broader context of their service partner organization or effort, the underlying social influences contributing to it, and the impacts of their service project in a comprehensive and scholarly fashion.
8. Create learning outcomes for their team members that contribute to the project’s goals and align with the program’s emphasis on equitable and long-term community partnerships.

Learning Objectives for Aggie Service Scholars

The Aggie Service Program is designed to accommodate learning that is extra-curricular (volunteers), co-curricular (485), and curricular (as part of specific service- learning courses) as well as serve the community partner and perpetuate the program. This requires flexibility to address specific learning objectives relevant to any associated service-learning course, the specific service project, and becoming a future Service Leader. First, assessment tools will have an option to include a section designed by class instructors. Second, the Service Leader will negotiate particular learning outcomes with their ream members (#8 above), including an appropriate subset learning objectives for those transitioning to leadership (#1-7 above).

Assessment of Community Partners

Assessment of community partners. The assessment of community partners will be based on a customer service framework with feedback about team performance and outcomes/deliverables associated with the service received developed with the Service Leaders (#3 above). Specific items to be assessed include communication, timeliness, skills employed by the student group and the overall experience – what should be continued and what needs work? At the end of each semester, Community Partners be asked whether the members of their service team have deserved designation as Aggie Service Scholars and Aggie Service Leaders.

Expected Program Outcomes

The Aggie Service Program is expected to be inclusive and quite grow quite large, based on our experience with the Aggie Research Program. This “sister program” has grown quickly to serve over 1,000 students, 41% of which are members of underrepresented groups (low-income or first generation, underrepresented minorities, and disabled students). We expect that the Aggie Service Program remain as inclusive and will grow to be at least as large within two years.