Professor thrives in service-learning projects

Fort Worth, TX

12/14/2007

By Lydia Akinde
TCU Schieffer School of Journalism

For Dr. Lyn Dart, associate professor of nutritional sciences, service-learning goes beyond community service. It’s a win-win experience for both faculty members and students. Looking at service-learning through her professional lenses, Dart says no matter what discipline is involved, it takes interest in community and student development to succeed.

“Service-learning for students is also about their gaining, growing their skills and learning that they can do certain things,” said Dart, who has taught at TCU for six years. “In nutrition, it encompasses the skills they will use down the line, that if they weren’t out doing service-learning and learning those skills, they wouldn’t have them.”

Service-learning is a practical approach to learning, which transforms academic studies into community impact through service, according to the National Service-Learning Clearing House. While students gain hands-on experience, faculty members embrace this opportunity for disciplinary research, fulfilling fieldwork and curriculum success.

For Dart, service-learning was a smooth transition as she had always made it an integral part of her nutrition curriculum. But she is not alone in this venture. Dart also credits part of her success to her partnership with Dr. Pamela Frable and Dr. Pat Bradley, faculty in the Harris College of Nursing & Health Sciences, on their Healthy Weigh project. This project was a multifaceted initiative, which began in 2003 to help low-income families cultivate healthy eating and physical activity patterns.

While the professors focus on its research component, Dart implements the service-learning course plans with the different agencies involved. “I like it a whole lot,” Dart said. “I believe in interdisciplinary interaction among different faculty members and among students because it enriches the experience.”

Nutrition and nursing are closely aligned, so it was an easy fit. Frable, associate professor of nursing, also attests to this benefit saying that service-learning helps make nursing more visible and creates the conditions necessary to address the complex health challenges people face.

Dart’s desire for community development is embedded in the nutrition profession, which ultimately goes out to help the community develop food sustainability and healthy diets. For her students, service-learning is valuable because they will realize the environmental influence on nutrition, and how food is secured. “All these are issues the students will face in their lifetime as practitioners,” Dart said.

One of these issues is food sustainability, which Allison McAdow and Jennifer Hunt, junior nutritional sciences majors, learned to solve in Dart’s Community Gardening for Active Citizenship course. Enrolled in this program as part of their Coordinated Program in Dietetics internship, the nutrition students, in conjunction with nursing students, have learned about soil, rain water harvesting, vegetable gardening, entomology and propagation. They established a garden at Nash Elementary School in Fort Worth and taught its students how to grow their own garden.

“This project is important because it shows a side of nutrition that most people do not know about. Sustainability is a vital skill that can help people survive by learning to plant their own vegetables,” McAdow said. “Education is a critical part of nutrition and dietetics, and this is a skill we can all use practice on.”

Dart also leads the Resource Connection Campus service-learning project and is a member of the TCU Service-Learning Task Force in an effort to spread this gospel to her faculty counterparts. As Dart thrives within her interrelated lives as associate professor, a registered dietician, a board member of the Tarrant Area Food Bank and the Senior Citizen Services of Tarrant County, and a mother of two, she aims for healthier communities one service-learning project at a time.