Reciprocal Benefits of Student

Service-Learning in Addressing
the Needs of Heritage Landscapes

• Cecilia Rusnak, Brian Orland

The Pennsylvania State University,
State College, Pennsylvania, USA
• Jan Hendrych
Silva Tarouca Botanical Research Institute,
Pruhonice, Czech Republic

• Supported by:
• The Heinz Endowments, and
• The Graduate College, Penn State
Benefits to study participants
• For both students and citizens:
– Active engagement in meaningful design and planning
experiences.
• Students:
– Diaries, sketchbooks, video, poster displays, reports,
– And perhaps: understanding, empathy, transferable
skills, commitment.
• Citizens:
– Plans, strategies, visions, reports,
– And perhaps: new approaches, capacity building,
confidence, resolve.
Cesky Raj (the Bohemian Paradise)
• Northern Czech Republic.
• Two centuries of tourism associated with natural
landscape of “rock cities,” sandstone cliffs, caves,
tunnels, and rock windows.
• Medieval castle ruins, chateaux, and traditional
Bohemian villages.
• Czech Protected Landscape Area targets both
cultural and natural resources for protection.
• Proposed for application for inscription on the World
Heritage List for its natural landscape properties.
Rock cities, Chateaux, Villages
Cesky Raj viewed from Trosky Castle
The Challenge
• The Administration of Protected Landscape Areas
cannot implement management practices until land
use plans for local communities and sites are drawn
up and approved.
• Completion of each community plan is uncertain—
there are limited government resources for this task.
• Community-based action could fill this planning void
but in the Czech Republic many years of centralized
planning have led to few having the skills to organize
citizens in collective and collaborative planning.
• Citizens do not know how to systematically collect
and use information to achieve planning goals.
Service Learning Pedagogy
• “The task of a University is to weld together
imagination and experience”
Alfred North Whitehead, 1929.
• John Dewey (1916) noted the importance not only of
action and experience but also of reflection on those
experiences as parts of the learning process.
• Service learning includes the engagement of
students and faculty with real community problems
and issues, and reciprocal community involvement in
study, learning, and problem-solving activities.
Service Learning in the University
• The pedagogical value of posing design problems in
the real-world settings of inner-city or depressed
rural communities has been matched by the
willingness, often enthusiasm, of those communities
to be the location of studies.
• Through learning side-by-side, citizens and students
learn about what needs to be done and by necessity
learn how to motivate and mobilize change.
• Service–learning builds knowledge and encourages
the development of personal, social, and cognitive
abilities.
• This active learning results in productive student-
faculty learning and teaching interactions, and
enhanced communication and critical thinking skills.
Study Abroad as Service Learning
• Immersion in the issues of problem solving in an
unfamiliar and changing setting enables students to
achieve a focus on active learning impossible to
achieve in a campus-based academic schedule.
• Away from competing classes, social schedules and
other distractions it is possible to implement an ideal
model of active learning – directed preparation,
participation in community-based problem-solving,
followed by structured reflection – without the usual
curricular constraints of compartmentalized classes.
Study Abroad as a Service Learning
Vehicle for Penn State
• Penn State’s Sede di Roma program, in downtown
Rome, offers few chances for design intervention,
and few opportunities for engaged service.
• The Central European Linkage Program, CELP, an
initiative of the Heinz Endowments enables
Pittsburgh professionals to bring community design
processes to bear on the problems of communities in
the Czech Republic long denied design and planning
services.
• Those locations, rich with cultural and historical
resources, challenge designers and planners to
balance the need to change with the times with the
need to preserve and restore their heritage settings.
Case Studies in the Czech Republic
• Eight students self-selected to participate in the
Czech program -- a collaboration of the Silva
Tarouca Research Institute, the Administration of
Protected Landscape Areas and the Department of
Landscape Architecture at Penn State.
• Two landscapes were studied:
– One by means of an intensive two-day idea-
generation workshop. In this case the “community”
consisted of professionals seeking advice on land use
and landscape management.
– A second landscape was studied over a longer term—
three weeks. Here there were two communities, one
a group of professionals, the other a community of
residents.
1 — Castle Humprect in Sobotka
• Managers sought a plan for the surrounding forest—
to defuse a conflict of interest between the foresters’
production practices, protection of the historic
monument, and conservation of nature and historic
landscape character.
Castle Humprect - restoring views
2 — Klokoci and Rotstejn
• A buffer zone valley adjacent to the Klokocske Scaly
rock formation. Villages maintain a traditional organic
settlement pattern and older architectural styles. The
landscape of fields and orchards reveals traces of
long-established strip field patterns.
Challenges in Klokoci
• Absence of a land use plan has led Klokoci to
approve unrestricted development that contrasted
with the natural and cultural landscape values.
• Increased tourism and community growth are
exacting pressure on the area’s natural and cultural
resources, resulting in ill-prepared new development.

Traditional patterns New development

Klokoci: Maintain traditional patterns
• Students collaborated with the Administration and
community representatives to address the increasing
demands placed on this landscape.
• Visualization of scenarios enables all participants to
see how management practices, or lack thereof,
would affect the region and its people.
Klokoci: Maintain traditional patterns
The Students’ Role
• Students developed landscape and visual character
analyses for two sites within the Cesky Raj Protected
Landscape Area.
• Students modeled approaches and techniques
amenable to adoption at the village level—an
important first step toward creating workable land
use and management plans.
• A team approach to problem-solving enabled ideas
to be more fully considered than if students and
citizens had worked as individuals.
• The liaison of State agency, community and
University may provide a model for assisting
emerging countries in their goals for protecting
heritage landscapes and at the same time meeting
important educational goals.
Outcomes: Student Experiences
Outcomes--Student reflections
• Concepts about the roles of designers of the built
environment were broadened and deepened.
• Team-based workshop setting revealed the value of
considering genuine differences and led to more
inclusive views of the roles of citizens and
professionals in community planning.
• The designer's role was expanded to include
understanding and responding to social structure as
well as physical structures.
Outcomes--Student observations
• In spite of dramatic change in Eastern Europe, the
rich heritage was evident in cities and countryside.
• Many of these places are successfully marketed to
tourists, offering the amenities and settings to which
visitors are drawn. Other places are just beginning a
deliberate effort to become a magnet for heritage
tourism. Still others may be reluctant to make their
sites accessible, preferring to maintain the status
quo as much as possible.
• In emerging societies such as the Czech Republic,
daily life for many is still a struggle. Students from
westernized countries recognized that many of the
simplest goods or services taken for granted at home
were unavailable to the average person.
Outcomes--Student perceptions
• Walking in unfamiliar places and making sensory
connections made students feel alive and refreshed.
• Observing government and economic structures,
students could discern, simultaneously, optimism in,
cautious acceptance of, and resentment of capitalist
ideals and practices.
• Tourism often results in the commodification of a
region's culture, and a consequence of this can be
erosion of the community's authenticity.
• Interacting with Czechs in these processes was
invaluable to an understanding of the sites studied,
and to the realization that intervention must come
from the place and its people.
Outcomes: Community benefits
Community Benefits
• At the heart of service-learning is the development of
reciprocal benefits for students and the service
recipients.
• In Turnov, the collaboration exceeded expectations.
The design accomplishments identified through the
group processes benefited all participants.
• Property owners in Klokoci are considering plans
that will be more compatible with the unique values
of the surrounding protected land and are in line with
the goals of the Administration.
• The students’ active collaboration and close team
work inspired community representatives as well as
the Administration staff. An ability to cooperate in a
close-knit setting is the most important advantage
realized from working on these projects.
Outcomes: Institutional benefits
Institutional benefits
• Service-learning situations provide an environment
where judgment can be exercised and refined, not
only with feedback and evaluation by the professor
but with the insights and multiple perspectives of
community members.
• The benefits of active learning—deeper insights and
engagement with the topic—are dramatically
heightened in the study abroad/service learning
situation. Empathy for the host community brings a
deepened interest in learning and working for
positive change.
• Service learning integrates Teaching, Research and
Service. The explicitly interdisciplinary, intercultural
and international elements of this work offer truly
transformative learning experiences for students.
Conclusions and implications
• Heritage landscapes in emerging or developing
economies are resource-poor. Concurrently, the
teaching situations in many North American
Universities are experience-poor.
• Campuses are predominantly suburban and distant
from the challenges of either vibrant urban centers or
declining rural communities. The daily
acquaintances of the students are much like
themselves in dress, accent and attitudes. Service-
learning in a study abroad setting brings quasi-
professional services to needy situations that in turn
provide a richness of setting and immediacy to the
relevance of students’ studies.
Conclusions and implications
• More than perhaps anything else we do, the
restoration and preservation of cultural landscapes
embodies values at the core of the host community,
that speak with clarity, urgency and immediacy to
students imbued with idealistic motivations.
• In a world where there are too few resources to
address problems, this model should be considered
carefully by historic preservation interests and by
agencies seeking to leverage the greatest possible
benefit from limited means.
• Brian Orland
Department of Landscape Architecture
The Pennsylvania State University,
State College, Pennsylvania, USA

boo1@psu.edu
http://www.larch.psu.edu