Speaker
Description
The Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS), administered by the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), is a campus-wide initiative that harnesses the expertise of UMD faculty and the energy and ingenuity of UMD students to help Maryland communities become more environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. PALS is designed to provide innovative, low-cost assistance to local governments while creating real-world problem-solving experiences for UMD graduate and undergraduate students.
The wide range of disciplines collaborating through PALS allows the partnering jurisdiction to address many real-world challenges. Faculty, who volunteer for the PALS program because of their interest and commitment to action learning, incorporate the jurisdiction's specific issues as part of their course's applied exercise. Students then put classroom concepts and inventive thinking to work to complete these sustainability-focused projects while working with a real client and producing a useful product for the partner city or county.
Students benefit through the real-world application of course concepts and meaningfully impacting Maryland communities. Faculty benefit through teaching existing courses in exciting, innovative ways and directing their academic efforts towards helping Maryland become more sustainable. Since 2014, PALS has completed over 280 projects, served 23 cities and counties, and engaged over 2400 students from 14 Schools and Colleges at the University of Maryland. It is funded in part from fees paid by the client communities, from the Campus administration, and from the Maryland state legislature.
In this paper, we describe and analyze the PALS program. We begin with an overview of the program, followed by an analysis of its performance measures, and perspectives of faculty, students, and local government staff obtained via a semi structured interview process. Our analysis suggests that the PALS program is an effective means of engaging university faculty and students in promoting sustainability in local governments across the state of Maryland. We find, however, that success of the program depends critically on the careful matching of courses and projects, careful oversight of the communication between university faculty and staff of the local governments, and considerable care with respect to the pedagogical design of the course material. The paper contributes to a growing literature on experiential learning and community engagement by universities across the globe.
References
Justin Kent, Jacqueline Tilton, Mark Lewis, Jesse Pipes (2013) Client-based student consulting: Insights for course design and delivery The International Journal of Management Education 21 (2023) 100854
Seungbin Park, Jill K. Clark, Ryan J. Schmiesing, Jason Reece, Michelle L. Kaiser, and Jee Young Lee (2024) Neighbors’ Perceptions of University Engaged “Research”, Journal of Planning Education and Research, (00)0:1–14 DOI: 10.1177/0739456X241284271
Jason Smith, Lynn E. Pelco, and Alex Rooke (2017) The Emerging Role of Universities in Collective Impact Initiatives for Community Benefit, Metropolitan Universities 28,4, DOI: 10.18060/21743
Leora S. Waldner and Debra Hunter (2008) Client-based Courses: Variations in Service Learning, Journal of Public Affairs Education, 14:2, 219-239, DOI: 10.1080/15236803.2008.12001521
Malinda S Zarske, Angela R Bielefeldt, Derik T. Reamon, (2013) The Impacts of Real Clients in Project-Based Service-Learning Courses, presented at the120th SEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Paper ID #7666
| Keywords | experiential learning; community engagement; client-based instruction; sustainable development |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
