Digital Commons Network^™

Youth Service-Learning And Community Service Among 6th- Through 12th-Grade Students In The United States: 1996 And 1999, Brian Kleiner, Chris Chapman

Special Topics, General

Involving America's students in community service activities is one of the objectives established under the third National Education Goal for the year 2000, which seeks to prepare students for responsible citizenship. Over the past 10 years, legislative initiatives have responded to and galvanized a growing national emphasis on increasing students' involvement with their local communities and linking this service to academic study through service-learning. Examples of initiatives that have mandated support for service-learning activities in elementary and secondary schools include the National and Community Service Act of 1990, the Serve America program and the National and Community Service Trust Act …

Service Strategies And Programs To Help Incarcerated Youth: A Training Program For Volunteers, Teresita Bolivar

Special Topics, General

For more than thirty years, AmeriCorps*VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) members have been serving disadvantaged communities. The program is dedicated to increasing the capability of people to improve the conditions of their lives.

Foster Grandparents are part of the National Senior Service Corps, a network of more than a half-million seniors who are making a difference as volunteers. Since 1965 the Foster Grandparents Program has tapped the experience, skills, talents, interests and creativity of seniors age 55 and older. They serve 20 hours a week in: schools, hospitals, day care centers, homes for abused and abandoned children, Head Start, …

A Kinder, Gentler Student Body, Linda Jacobson

Special Topics, General

Monica Viega describes what went on in her classroom earlier in the school year as "Jerry Springer fights." Displays of anger and incivility among the 5th graders sometimes grew so intense that furniture would get tossed across the room. But the scene in Ms. Viega's classroom no longer resembles a raucous daytime talk show. Every morning, her Blalock Elementary School students sit in a circle and discuss how they treat one another. They talk about what they see on the television news and about keeping drugs and violence out of their neighborhoods. "This amazes me," Ms. Viega, a first-year teacher, …

A Study Of The Effects Of Participation In The Helper Model Of Service Learning In Early Adolescence, Center For Advanced Study In Education (Case)

Special Topics, General

The Service Learning Impact Study is a multifaceted multi-year study funded by the William T. Grant Foundation to examine the impact of the Helper Model of service learning. This research is exploring whether and how participation by middle school students contributes to the development of academic or school-related skills, enhances psychosocial abilities, and leads to the acquisition of skills for the school to work transition.

The goals of this project are to:
• examine the impact of participating during early adolescence in service learning (Helper Program)
• identify how impact is related to program characteristics and the types of service …

Service-Learning And School Curriculum, Amy Yip Ah-May

Special Topics, General

Service-Learning extends the learning process from the classroom to the community, which becomes a supplementary resource to facilitate teaching and learning. This paper uses fragments of reflections to illustrate how Service-Learning course participants learn through the community-service projects and how they feel about their experiences as project leaders. The literature used provides a rich source of data about the meaning of Service-Learning and empirical evidences of the educational effects of learning through serving others. This paper argues that the Hong Kong school curriculum is examination driven and focused on the academic. There is a neglect in the social, moral and …