Abstract:

The purpose of this study was to describe and evaluate a service learning, landscape design/build course that was delivered during the COVID pandemic, by considering student surveys and reflections. A 2019 hybrid and 2020 wholly online classes were evaluated and compared. Survey responses measured student’s emotions and their perceptions about course learning objective and class activities. One of the goals was to gauge the effectiveness of student critical thinking, confidence, civic responsibility and professionalism.

In order to build confidence, enhance problem-solving, model ethical environmental and cultural responsibility, which are necessary to be a professional landscape designer today, we need to engage landscape design students with experiential learning that involves stakeholders.

Although much has been studied about skill development, the impacts of teaching and learning within a service-learning context is less prevalent. Further, while these experiences are a challenge for faculty to orchestrate, experiential learning has implications for enriching student learning and fostering a positive professional attitude.

Further, little research is found in how students’ emotional states impacts learning. Therefore, a second goal was to learn about how a pleasurable state of mind may accompany a greater capacity for problem solving. In addition to our interest in students’ state of emotion, we were also interested in connecting at a more personal level with our students who were distressed to be “sent home” after the first two weeks of a face to face class.

The method was to administer a weekly check-in survey to our students, which helped us to open the discussion about feelings, as we assessed their emotional state and their perceptions about the previous week’s class activities. We also administered an end of semester survey/ reflection in both 2019 and 2020.

The results describe the impacts, which reveal challenges and reinforce the value of teaching landscape design in a service learning course. This work tackles the challenge of teaching a design course that builds skills and critical thinking abilities while applying them in a service-learning design project, which weaves throughout the course. It displays how to use the design process and the critical thinking cycle to structure the course objectives and the project process. This will help faculty to structure a service learning (community-engaged) component using critical thinking in their design courses both face-to-face and online. It provides a description and a comparison of impacts to student learning in both scenarios.

Keywords:

emotions, hands-on, civic responsibility, design thinking, education, online teaching, social connections