My Gift to Huron

21 December 2009

Deciding on the gift you want to make to a place you love is a special pleasure. As I thought about my personal donation to Huron's Touch the Future Campaign, I realized that I had the chance to nurture an initiative dear to my heart, Community-Based Learning for our students. Sometimes known as service learning or experiential learning, this approach to education gives students an opportunity to explore, often within the context of a credit course, social and political issues prevalent in their society.

Community-Based Learning (CBL) typically entails a volunteer placement with a community agency, but academic credit isn't awarded for the placement. Rather, students in CBL placements are asked to reflect critically on their structured activities within public, government, NGO or advocacy groups, and to connect their experience with academic and personal learning. CBL allows us to build on our students' keen interest in volunteer service. At the same time, it deepens and enriches students' understanding of the complex relationships that come into play when they engage with communities outside the classroom.

This term, for example, students in two of Dr. Reid-Maroney's courses, The Historian's Craft and African-American History, worked on a project that documented the important role played by the southwestern Ontario community of Dresden in helping African Americans escape slavery. Students engaged with the Diocese of Huron archives to digitize and transcribe the 19th-century manuscript diary of the anti-slavery cleric The Reverend Thomas Hughes. In November guests from Christ Church in Dresden attended our campus to take part in the students' showcase of what they had learned. The students' pride in their historical research was evident, as was the pleasure our Dresden guests took in recovering vital information about their past.

Huron has a rich tradition, in both the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, of providing students with opportunities to serve their communities. We continue to explore new ways to make volunteer service even more meaningful in the future. The CBL endowment that I've established in honour of my parents (the late William Hayward Lumpkin and the still vibrant Willie Mae Lumpkin) will make a contribution to these efforts and so is deeply satisfying to me as a donor.

Ramona Lumpkin, PhD
Principal