Sociology Commons^™

Violence, Youth And A Way Out, John A. Calhoun

Special Topics, General

It is a conviction shared by those who care for young people and their families that violence among youth has reached intolerable levels and that a response is demanded. The homicide statistics are chilling: In 1986, four to five people under age 18 were murdered per day, 10 percent more than in 1985. Equally chilling, three to four people under 18 were arrested for murder every day, a seven percent increase over 1985.

Evaluating And Working With Community Agencies: A Guide For The Principal, Carl I. Fertman

Partnerships/Community

Schools can take the initiative in dealing with community agencies, says this writer, who offers some suggestions on how schools can help such agencies develop programs to meet student needs.

Issues And Action In The Streams Of Service, Frank J. Slobig

Service Learning, General

The landscape across the country is sporadically spotted with an increasing number of locations where young people are engaged in sustained significant service. They are involved in part-time school-based programs in junior and senior high schools, in campus-based collegiate programs and in full-times corps.

The Time Is Right: A Report Of The Youth Serviceamerica And Brown University Youth Service Leadership Conference, Youth Service America

Conference Proceedings

This report, summarizing the proceedings at a February 1988 conference at Brown University on youth service,presents briefly an overview of the emerging network of youth service programs in the following states: (1) Minnesota; (2) Pennsylvania; (3) California; (4) Massachusetts; and (5) Ohio. Rationales for youth service are analyzed. Eight strategies for implementing youth service programs at the state level are identified. Individual programs, such as the Youth Volunteer Corps of Greater Kansas City, and City Year in Boston, are discussed. The following types of youth service programs,and means of expanding them are outlined: (1) full-time corps; (2) campus-based service; and …

Conversation Piece: National Service, Is It For Us?, Carl A. Bade

Special Topics, General

Many of the writers, conceptual developers, and advocates of a National Service Program for the United States credit William James with issuing, in 1910, the first call to youth to be enlisted in a program entitled "The Moral Equivalent of War,'' The program was envisioned to engage youth in industrial work and social service, according to their skills and interests. While that did not come to fruition, we saw some forms of it instituted during the bleak days and years of the Great Depression in the 1930's. Thousands of youth were enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps beginning in 1933, …

National Service And Religious Values, L. William Yolton, Edward L. Long Jr.

Special Topics, General

The idea of national service covers a range of proposals for organizing young people and, in some cases, senior citizens to do work of national importance to satisfy unmet needs in the society. How people at middle age would be engaged in service is rarely discussed.

Roots Of Service, Theodore H. Erickson

Special Topics, General

The thesis that I want to advance is a simple one: It is that service is rooted in religion. Service is religious in the sense that it expresses our bondedness with the universe (religare: to bind fast), and by extension with one another. Over time, service-oriented activities may become rationalized, institutionalized, and secularized. But the roots of service remain religious.

The Impact Of Volunteer Experience On Adolescent Social Development: Evidence Of Program Effects, Stephen F. Hamilton, L. Mickey Fenzel

School K-12

The Social and Personal Responsibility Scale was employed in a study of the Youth Volunteers program, involving 44 adolescents in 12 projects, equally divided between child care and community service. Participants showed statistically significant gains on the Social Responsibility sub-scale. Girls gained more than boys and volunteers in community improvement projects gained more than those in child care. However, as in previous studies, gains were quite modest. Testimony from adolescents and adult participants was more strongly positive, volunteers citing improvement in their knowledge of themselves and others and the acquisition of new skills, adults seeing greater willingness to make decisions. …

The Roles Of Youth In Society: A Reconceptualization, Ruthanne Kurth-Schai

School K-12

The 1980s have been characterized as a decade of platforms for educational change. In 19S3 alone, five reports were released by national task forces and commissions, all expressing serious concern for the future of youth and society, and all proposing recommendations for ways in which educational policies and practices might be altered, to address such concerns.

Service-Learning: An Annotated Bibliography Linking Public Service With The Curriculum, Janet Luce, Jennifer Anderson, Janet Permaul, Robert Shumer, Timothy Stanton, Sally Migliore

Bibliographies

Interest in "service-learning" is on the rise these days. The so-called apathy of the late nineteen seventies and early eighties has given way to a renewed upsurge in student activisim and public and community service. The Campus Compact coalition of university presidents has supported these efforts on their campuses through the strengthening of campus public service programs and through advocacy for "higher education for social responsibility" at the national level. One national commission after another includes community service or internship-based learning as a key recommendation for the reform of the undergraduate curriculum. In this atmosphere the concept and practice of …

Learning In The Community, John Formy-Duval, Ellen Voland

Service Learning, General

Community educators refer fondly to William Carr's words as "the drawbridge analogy." As community involvement specialists, they are committed to keeping the drawbridge down, so that adults from the mainland can both provide and use resources in the school, and so that young people from the school can go regularly to the mainland, learning to apply and understand-what they have read in their books.

Mainstreamed Students Doing Community Service: The Positive Effects, Joanne Urgese

Disabilities

Since the enactment of public law 94-142 in 1975, public schools have been searching for ways to extend the opportunities for their handicapped students to receive more of their education with nonhandicapped peers. While looking for ways to do this they have also been concerned with the outcomes such placement would have on the students in such areas as social adjustment and academic achievement. The Shorehan-Wading River Middle School has had a program in place since 1973 which responds to this need. This program, called community service, is most effective in promoting positive mainstreaming in both the area of social …

Does Values Education Belong In The Curriculum?, David W. Hornbeck

Curriculum

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am particularly enthusiastic about joining you to discuss values education. It is one of the three most important challenges favoring American public education. The other two, parenthetically, are: (1) Successfully meeting the needs of children and youth at risk of school failure; and (2) The availability of sufficient quantities of quality teachers. Frankly, the three are very much intertwined, but this afternoon I will focus on values education.

The Classroom Researcher's Research Agenda, American Association For Higher Education

Higher Education

Involvement and critique from educators in dialogue with researchers is a critical element for achieving clarity about what research will benefit educational policy and practice. The AAHE Research Forum is convened annually to involve individuals committed to research and scholarship in higher education. The Forum stimulates educators' involvement in creating a research agenda that speaks to current educational concerns. Since each year's agenda is developed around the conference theme, educators and researchers can continually rely on the Forum agenda as an up-to-date source of research questions of common interest that flow from the year's most central educational issues. The Forum …

Dewey's Theory Of Experience: Implications For Service-Learning, Dwight E. Giles

Service Learning, General

Cornell’s Dwight Giles, Jr. relates John Dewey’s concept about education and experience to service-learning. Giles suggest a dialectical interaction between service and learning, which had implications for ensuring quality in service learning programs and for defining service-learning as a philosophy rather than as a type of program.

Reclaiming A Needed Resource: Minnesota's Youth, Minnesota Task Force On Youth Service And Work

Special Topics, General

Report and plan of action to Governor Rudy Perpich

The Effects Of Service Activities On Adolescent Alienation, Raymond L. Calabrese, Harry Schumer

School K-12

This research evaluated the effects of involvement of adolescents in community service activities on levels of alienation. It was proposed that alienation could be reduced through the implementation of a model which utilized community service activities to facilitate adolescent access to adult society, development of responsibility, collaborative and cooperative work, and control over planning and outcomes. It is suggested that adolescent involvement in service activities can produce positive benefits, among which are reduced levels of alienation, improved school behavior, improved grade point average, and acceptance by the adult community. These findings also suggest that females respond more positively to school …

The Youth In Service To Elders (Yiste) Program: A Case Study, Sally Newman, Heather Newman, Roland Onawola, Caroline Thompson

Intergenerational

The Youth In Service To Elders (YISTE) Program was developed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to meet some of the psychosocial needs of the frail elderly and young student volunteers. The objectives were to promote positive interactions between these groups, to improve the psychosocial well-being of the frail elderly, and to improve the student volunteers' feelings about themselves and about aging. This paper describes the YISTE program and its evaluation. The program sequence was recruitment of youth and elders, training of youth participants, supervision of the youth and elder participants, recognition, and evaluation. Two distinctive features of the program were the involvement …

Bibliography Of Research In Experiential Learning, Internships And Field Studies, Jennifer Anderson, Leslie Smith

Bibliographies

This bibliography is designed to be a working tool for those interested in or involved in experiential education. It is not meant to be a static, definitive document, but a resource which is constantly growing and changing as it is used, and as new research becomes available.

Intergenerational Service Programs: Meeting Shared Needs Of Young And Old, Debra L. Cherry, Frank R. Benest, Barbara Gates, Joanne White

Special Topics, General

This society's adolescent and elderly populations share many needs and characteristics. Both often have little access to meaningful social roles. For example, neither is likely to be fully integrated into the work force and, consequently, both groups tend to have high rates of unemployment (Pearl, 1978; Sheppard, 1976). Moreover, their family roles tend to be in transition. Teenagers are ·in the process of gaining independence from their parents while many older adults face changes such as the loss of a spouse or decreased family power relative to their middle-aged children. The lack of meaningful social roles has been blamed for …

Evaluating Student Volunteer And Service-Learning Programs: A Casebook For Practitioners, Michele Whitham, Eric C. Little, Michael Whitesage, Richard Cone, Jane Szuru Permal, Jack Knott, Roy A. Weaver, James H. Mcelhinney, Joyce K. Allen, Roger Henry, Terrence J. Mctaggart, Janet Warnert

Evaluation/Reflection

Today, evaluation concepts and methods are widely available to those who plan and administer student volunteer programs. Unfortunately, however, evaluation has all too often been carried out-and written about-in ways that have robbed it of its usefulness to people dealing with the realities of day-to-day program operation. Evaluation has thus acquired the reputation among practitioners of being too complex, too costly, too time-consuming, even too threatening to be of much practical value.

A Meta-Analysis On Experience Based Career Education, Ronald B. Bucknam, Sheara G. Brand

Special Topics, General

Our meta-analysis of 80 evaluations of Experience Based Career Education (EBCE) programs shows that EBCE works. Students not only scored significant gains in career, life attitude, and academic skills during their EBCE experience, but they also showed significantly greater gains in all three of those outcome areas than comparison students who received the regular high school curriculum. The positive statistical significance of the findings was so large that we developed a new index, called the "Basic Index of Strength" or the BIS, in order to discuss and compare differences in the strength of the findings.

Intergenerational Service-Learning: Contributions To Curricula, James P. Firman, Donald E. Gelfand, Catherine Ventura

Intergenerational

This article reports some findings from a national demonstration project involving the National Council on the Aging (NCOA) and thirteen colleges and universities. We studied 39 courses in which students were involved in service-learning in aging. We describe and discuss (1) the range of demonstrably feasible 'adoptions, (2) what faculty say their students learned from the experiences, and (3) faculty perceptions of personal benefits and costs associated with developing and directing these projects.

Students As Resources To The Aging Network, James P. Firman, Donlad E. Gelfand, Catherine Ventura

Intergenerational

In times of shrinking resources and growing needs, the aging network must increase its efforts to involve the voluntary sector in services and programs for the aged. A relatively untapped source of manpower is our nation's 12,300,000 students in 3,200 colleges and universities. This article, based on the findings of a national demonstration project, examines feasible outcomes and practical limitations of service-learning as an approach for increasing the involvement of students in providing services to older persons.

Service Experience And The Moral Development Of College Students, Margaret Gorman, Joesph Duffy, Margaret Heffernan

Higher Education

A considerable body of literature on deliberate moral education is now accumulating. Blatt was the first to explore the effect of 'classroom discussion on the level of moral judgment, Others have continued to report on moral education in both the secondary and college levels,

The Impact Of Experiential Education On Adolescent Development, Daniel Conrad, Diane Hedin

School K-12

This article summarizes the findings of a national study of 27 varied programs and concludes that experience-based educational programs can have a significant positive impact on the social, psychological, and intellectual development of adolescents.

Helping The Community: An Untapped Resource For Troubled Children, Alec J. Allen, Martin L. Mitchell

Special Topics, General

All too often adults have cornered the market on helping. They work within voluntary organizations and church groups to meet the needs of the community. for many this service continues within their jobs as educators and social service providers. Occasionally a place is cast aside for youth to participate. The challenge becomes how to involve troubled youth in helping others to reap the benefits popularized in the phrase "It is more blessed to give than to receive." If there is strength to be derived from.giving, then let us be creative in sharing these opportunities with those who have more to …

Learning Outcomes: The Measurement And Evaluation Of Experimential Learning, John S. Duley

Evaluation/Reflection

The focus of this paper is on measuring and evaluating the learning acquired by students in field experience education, not on program evaluation. This paper serves as an introduction and supplement to the books listed on the last page. One of these, EFFICIENT EVALUATION OF INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE IN FIELD PLACEMENT, is provided as part of this PANEL Resource Paper.

Applications Of Developmental Theory To The Design And Conduct Of Quality Field Experience Programs: Exercises For Educators, Michele Whitman, Albert Erdynast

Service Learning, General

Much has been made in experiential learning circles of the implications of empirical findings in developmental psychology for the formulation of a theoretically convincing rationale for field experience education programs of every kind. Of particular significance has been the identification of cognitive structural stages of intellectual, moral, social and ego development through which individuals have been shown to progress--structural transformations of the individual's intra- and interpersonal capacities which closely mirror the traditionally articulated goals of higher education for students' growth. Even as such concepts have been advanced, however, practitioners have voiced persistent reservations about the theory's seeming elitism, the values …

Long-Term Effects Of Community Service Programs, James Beane, Joan Turner, David Jones, Richard Lipka

Service Learning, General

The need to develop connections between life in the school and that in the community is a recurring theme in educational literature. Of the many means for doing this, one of the more prominent is experiential learning or "planned opportunities for learning outside the classroom" (Hamilton 1980). Within the experiential learning concept, one variation which has received a good deal of attention is youth participation programs or community service projects (Olsen 1946; National Society for the Study of Education 1953; Harnack 1974; Coleman 1974; National Commission on Resources for Youth 1974). Such programs involve the active engagement of youth in …