The goal of any Academically Based Community Service Course (ABCS) is to integrate research and teaching with service. The successful ABCS course allows students and faculty to learn through reflective consideration how knowledge actually achieves community improvement. As such, it offers unique opportunities that no classroom experience can replicate: Students are active participants in their own learning and are consistently reminded that the goal of that learning is improvement of the quality of life for people they interact with on a regular basis. There are no hypothetical “people I will help in the future.” Rather, the responsibility for mastering the knowledge presented in the Penn classroom is coupled directly to sharing that knowledge and applying it in practical ways to enhance the immediate good. One thing that ABCS and non-ABCS courses share in common is the joy course instructors receive from knowing that the lessons learned are carried on through the students who improve and expand on what they have experienced as part of the class. This article represents the personal story of an exemplary Penn student.

—Larry Gladney, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence and Associate Dean for Natural Sciences

—Bill Berner, Physics Demo Lab Coordinator

In the fall of my junior year, I registered for PHYS 137 (Community Physics Initiative), an ABCS course taught by Professor Larry Gladney and Bill Berner. Between me and my 10 other classmates, we wrote, practiced and taught introductory physics labs to classes at Boys Latin and Furness High School. During the course, I realized I deeply enjoyed the communication of science and decided to continue the experience after the semester ended. I reached out to West Catholic High School, which previously did not have a physics lab curriculum, and worked with Moelis Access Science at the Netter Center to organize volunteers to teach weekly experiments. Now, as a recent graduate, I reflect on my service learning experience as a crucial part of my development at Penn. Despite the extra labor involved for faculty and students, service learning taught me lessons I could not have gained through lectures alone, and I write here to share some of my most important takeaways.

Leading labs during the ABCS course and starting a new program with West Catholic helped me learn the best teaching techniques and structures for effective engagement from the schools. For example, one limitation of volunteering as an undergraduate was that I could not practice an experiment every day over multiple periods like a high school teacher can. Thus, when one week went poorly, I learned to thoroughly record feedback and suggestions for improvement so that next year’s volunteers would not repeat a lesson that was too chaotic or ineffective. Casual talks with students during downtime also helped, revealing which labs truly stuck and which ones did not. Practical lessons such as these were equally as important to me as the scientific ones. Through service learning, I also learned that effective listening precedes effective service, and I started initiating regular meetings with the teachers and administration to get their advice on the best methods to teach large classes with limited volunteers and time. These meetings, which included frank conversations about expectations and improvements on lab structure, were extremely helpful for making the service learning meaningful and rewarding for both parties. Learning how to listen is a skill I will carry with me both inside and outside the lab.

Teaching a subject is one of the best ways to master it, and I learned real physics by teaching physics. For example, I taught a roller coaster lab in which the students had to experimentally find the minimum starting height for a ball to clear a circular loop. I solved this problem on paper many times in freshman physics, but never did the experiment. By teaching the lab and making mistakes, I learned new aspects of the problem, such as the fact that a rolling ball needs more height than a sliding object. Understanding the students’ impediments to learning became a part of my own STEM education, and asking students and myself to verbalize an intuitive explanation without any math helped me truly grasp the mechanics concepts, not just the equations. As a bonus, I also learned and taught real-life applications, such as the fact that real-life coasters are shaped as teardrops, not circles, and why that is.

When put into practice, labs often did not work as expected, and troubleshooting experiments was a research exercise that made me a more resourceful scientist. In a projectile-motion lab, results from the experiment we ran did not match theory, and I had to explain the discrepancy in class to puzzled students. Eventually, I realized and explained to students that we left out a component of the starting velocity. The experience felt very similar to ones in the research lab, where discoveries about nature often start with the question, “Where did I screw up?” In other cases, working in the Philadelphia urban classroom environment pushed me to innovate. For a demo on circular motion, we wanted to measure centripetal acceleration. Most schools don’t have accelerometers lying around, so Mr. Berner showed us a method using an old, hollowed-out ant farm filled with water. When the apparatus is spun in a circle, the water is pushed outward, forming a parabolic shape. This simple setup, which the students could make themselves, showed me and the high school students how to be citizen scientists in our everyday lives without fancy equipment.

Teaching Community Physics broadened my perception of career options in science and its potential for social impact. For example, to prepare for going into the schools, we read articles in physics education research, a field I did not know existed before the course. Working closely with Mr. Berner, Dr. Gladney and the science teachers at West Catholic also inspired me to seriously consider “non-traditional” career paths, such as those in science writing or science policy. Even if I still end up in academia, my ABCS experience instilled in me a social responsibility to communicate and spread knowledge to the public, whether it be through bringing local high school students into the lab or developing introductory courses for undergraduates. In addition, I connected my physics education experience to knowledge in other fields during the course. For example, learning about the challenges of English Language Learners (ELL) students during ASAM 205 (Asian American Communities), another ABCS course I took freshman year, helped me include students who often understood lab concepts, but were not always fluent in science’s jargon and vocabulary. Experiences like this re-emphasized to me that science, research and learning do not happen in a vacuum.

Overall, service learning transformed me as a scientist, bringing me out of the ivory tower and into the community. It prompted me to reflect on Penn’s local role as a world-class university in West Philadelphia. At the same time, teaching the introductory labs taught me new aspects of freshmen physics I did not catch the first time, and the moments of excitement when students were surprised by a result always inspired me. One student wrote in an end-of-the-year survey that she was surprised when she successfully predicted where to place weights to balance a seesaw ruler, and that lab helped her understand equilibrium. Other students wrote that they generally gained more confidence in science and math even if they were not interested in pursuing STEM careers. Reading these comments affirmed to me that undergraduate engagement in West Philadelphia, while not perfect, has value and impact, and wherever I end up, my service experiences will shape the way I do, teach and connect science to society.

—Kevin Chen, CAS ’18

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.