Community service comes naturally to Jumana Dahleh.
In high school, the Boston-area native — now a first-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — frequently spent part of her weekends teaching kids ice hockey at the local rink. She served as a tutor and occasionally helped out at a few local farms. And, between her sophomore and junior years of high school, she even traveled to Thailand for three weeks to volunteer at a farm that housed battered women and an orphanage for children with HIV.
"I've done a lot of volunteer work, and I definitely want that to be a part of my life, whether it's a career or just something that I continue to do on the side," she says. "I feel like it's almost your personal responsibility that if you can do it and you're able to give back, you should do it."
She isn't alone in that regard on the UW-Madison campus: the university is currently the top producer of Peace Corps volunteers in the United States. And of the liberal arts students who visited Letters & Science Career Services for advising during the semester's first two months, 67 percent expressed interest in careers in a public service-related career cluster.
So, when Dahleh was searching for a course that would fit into her busy fall schedule at UW-Madison, one class title immediately caught her eye — Social Work 275 Making a difference: Professions that change the world.
"I was like, 'I want to take that,'" Dahleh recalls.
Students work in groups to analyze different approaches to various social problems, such as domestic violence and world hunger.
The School of Social Work created the course for first-year students like Dahleh who arrive on campus wanting to improve the world but unsure of a specific career trajectory.
"They come in knowing they want to help people, but they don't know what that means," says Professor of Social Work Stephanie Robert, who took over the course this fall. She sees it as an ideal fit with her interdisciplinary background, both as a public health and social work researcher and as co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program at UW-Madison, a role in which she trains postdoctoral scholars across a variety of fields.
Robert splits the class into groups to grapple with some of the social problems that plague our world — topics such as child and adolescent mental health, domestic violence and racial disparities in education. She asks students to assess their own strengths and weaknesses, dig deeper into the complex causes of social problems and analyze various approaches to exacting social change (from social entrepreneurship to community organizing). Group discussions allow for a range of voices, says freshman Danny Prager.
"There's a lot of diversity of thought," he says. "It's opened my eyes, but it's also strengthened some of my beliefs."
Students read articles and book chapters from different disciplines — psychology, social work, communications, behavioral economics, and more — to see how different professions can contribute to the greater good. They choose the social problem they're most interested in and work in groups of four or five to create problem statements, map causes, and examine viable approaches.
Students discuss their group topics.
Dahleh, who is of Jordanian descent, chose to work on global child poverty, in part because she says she has seen it firsthand on several trips to the Middle East. But she's also interested in childhood obesity and, true to her athletic background (she swapped hockey for crew and was recruited to join the Badgers’ lightweight rowing team), empowering young girls around the world to participate in sports. And she says she's already rethought her intended major, in part because of her experience in the course — after coming in wanting to major in biology, she's now considering psychology and political science, as well as the global health certificate.
"I think it's actually had most of the impact because of Professor Robert," she says. "She's been a great introduction to having a professor. I've really enjoyed learning from her and being in her class."
Robert says the idea isn't to simply try to draw in more social work majors, but rather to connect with freshmen at a time when they're wrestling with questions about their career and life directions and "get them on a path to good citizenship."
"The School of Social work is very interested, whether people come through social work or not, in just having a world in which there are people who care about social change and helping other people," Robert says. "I expect that by the end of the semester, students will feel more confident about their ability to get involved in efforts to change the world — either through their careers or as volunteers."