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Abstract
In recent years, educators from diverse academic disciplines have created service learning courses in response to natural disasters. However, sociology courses have been slow to integrate service learning after disasters. In this paper, the learning experiences of fourteen students enrolled in a service learning course during the Fall 2011 semester at the University of Alabama are analyzed, four months after the April 27, 2011 tornado event. In this course, entitled Gender and Poverty, students were required to volunteer 30 hours over a 10-week period with an organization that assisted tornado survivors in addition to attending weekly class meetings and completing class assignments. Despite initial difficulties finding interactive service experiences for the students, post-tests and journal assignments indicated a shift in students' explanations of poverty from mostly individual-level explanations to structural explanations of poverty. The service experience also emotionally transformed the students, who through their service efforts, developed empathy for storm survivors.
Introduction
The tornadoes of April 27, 2011 brought great destruction to the Deep South. An EF4 tornado left 53 people dead and approximately 1,000 injured in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama alone. The tornado left 5,362 residences damaged or decimated in its path. The storms pre-emptively ended the semester at the University of Alabama, and many students whose permanent homes were located outside of Tuscaloosa left the city without witnessing the extent of the damage in their college town.
Despite the horrible destruction that natural disasters can inflict on communities, tornadoes and other similar events can provide unique opportunities to connect classroom learning to real-world situations. Colleges and universities have assisted in recovery efforts after Hurricanes Floyd (Steiner & Sands, 2000) and Katrina (Domangue & Carson, 2008; Mehta & Sukumaran, 2007; Richards, Novak, & Davis, 2009; Schulenberg et al., 2008) and the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake (O'Steen & Perry, 2012), applying their specialized skills in medicine, engineering, and nursing to contribute to relief efforts. Despite an emerging body of research about the social consequences of natural disasters (Bolin, 2006; Fothergill & Peek, 2004), there is a lack of research describing how service after a natural disaster can assist students' learning of sociological concepts.
After the Tuscaloosa tornado, the service component of the service learning course, entitled Gender and Poverty, was revisited to allow...