Service Learning Commons^™

Building Citizenship: How Student Voice In Service-Learning Develops Civic Values, William Morgan, Matthew Streb

Service Learning, General

Objectives. Though many decry the decline in political participation and interest, few academic studies present a clear approach to help reverse these trends. This paper examines the impact of service-learning programs on students’ self-concept, political engagement, and attitudes toward out-groups. Methods. The data come from a pre and post survey given to more than 200 high school students in 10 different schools. We use Huber regression to assess the impact of student voice in the service-learning project on six dependent variables. Results. We show that if students are involved in service-learning projects in which they have a high degree …

Institutionalized Service-Learniing In The 50 States, Kathy Anthes

Service Learning, General

Service-learning is a teaching method that combines service to the community with classroom curriculum. Service-learning is more than merely community service. It is a hands-on approach to mastering subject material while fostering civic responsibility. On a programmatic level, service-learning in America is thriving. Through funds from the Corporation for National Service, almost every state has resources and some level of a service-learning program. Although practitioners and other service-learning advocates have long regarded service-learning as a way to increase student achievement and student civic engagement and decrease a host of problems, such as drop-out rates and school crime and violence, there …

Community Service Learning In Culturally Diverse Stettings As A Springboard For Student Constructed Case Studies, Viviana Alexandrowicz

Service Learning, General

This article describes the process of incorporating case study development by students in a teacher education methods course. The students weekly and final reflections, in addition to the high quality of their case studies, suggested that case study development by teacher candidates is an effective approach to increase their understanding of and competence to work with second language and culturally diverse people.

Service-Learning Delivers What Americans Want From Schools (New Poll Shows A Way To Improve Public Education), Academy For Educational Development

Service Learning, General

It is not news that: Americans are deeply concerned about the quality of public education,² nor that almost half of them believe that improving schools should be our nation's highest priority.³ What is news is that Americans believe that service-learning can deliver what they expect from schools.

A new poll asked more than 1000 Americans⁴ about their views of K-12 education and service-learning, a way of teaching that integrates service projects into core academic curriculum. The poll was conducted by Roper Starch Worldwide for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Principles Of Good Practice For Service-Learning In Preservice Teacher Education, Jeffrey B. Anderson, Don Hill

Service Learning, General

The purpose of this document is to provide principles to guide the integration of service-learning into the preservice teacher education curriculum. The ten principles included here were developed by a group of over 80 teacher educators and service-learning practitioners from all regions of the U.S. who contributed their ideas and feedback in order to achieve consensus. (Contributors are listed in Appendix B). These principles of good practice can be used by teacher educators to design and assess their service-teaming activities, and by policy makers to guide decisions regarding resource allocation and program development.

Shumer's Self-Assessment For Service Learning, Robert D. Shumer, Pat Duttweiler, Andrew Furco, Madeleine S. Hengel, Gwen Willems

Service Learning, General

The Shumer Self-Assessment for Service-Learning (SSASL) is designed as a self-reflective system for professionals in the service-learning and experiential learning fields. What follows is a series of instruments and analysis worksheets arranged to help individuals evaluate their current service-learning initiatives to improve and strengthen them.

The Community College Conscience: Service-Learning And Training Tomorrow's Teachers, Robert Franco

Service Learning, General

Across the landscape of American higher education, one senses the increasing intellectual colonization of higher education by advocates of accountability and gurus of management. Business and private-sector terms, such as "risk taking," "restructuring," "client focused" and "responsive to market demands" weave their way through what many call the "creeping vocationalism" of higher education.

At the same time, universities, colleges, nonprofit organizations and private business extol the virtues of thoughtful "mission statements" designed to focus energy and activities within the organization and represent the organization to its "clientele." Rarely, however, does one hear about or challenge the "conscience"1 of organizations in …

Reading The Lives Of Others: The Winton Homes Library Project A Cultural Studies Analysis Of Critical Service Learning For Education, Matt Musucci, Adam Renner

Service Learning, General

This article examines the value and usefulness of expanding a particular approach to service learning in an educational setting. As a result of participating in a graduate seminar that combined cultural studies with service learning, reflecting on involvement in a service project, and a careful reading of relevant literature, the authors advocate for a more critical engagement with the reality of overwhelming social injustice. Moreover, the authors suggest a four-step framework (critical service learning), which is informed by both cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Finally, the authors argue for the adaptation of this framework into the school curriculum-thereby providing students …

The Effects Of Service Learning, Shelley H. Billig

Service Learning, General

Research, while limited, finds that students who help others help themselves academically and socially.

Costs And Benefits And Service Learning, Alan Melchior

Service Learning, General

A growing body of evidence points to school-based service learning as an effective means of achieving a variety of critical school and community goals. But what do we know about the costs of service learning?

Service Learning In An Age Of Standards, Terry L. Pickeral, Judy Bray

Service Learning, General

"The new standards have to do with application of basic learning. Students take things that at one time they simply memorized and instead take them into real-life settings. The graduation standards offer the opportunity for every student and teacher to bring learning to a higher level. Application, synthesis, analysis and integration of information are what real learning is all about."

Jim Grimmer, a teacher of philosophy at Richfield High School in Richfield, Minn., articulates one view of the connection between service learning and academic standards. At a time when academic standards, along with assessments and accountability, represent the big-dog reform …

Free To Choose Service Learning, Michael P. Garber, Justin A. Heet

Service Learning, General

Only disciples of Ayn Rand could oppose the idea of service-learning. In the best situations, when service is part of a school's program. students are challenged to define themselves through a larger sense of their community and of their responsibility to it. They have the opportunity to apply their skills to problems that require judgment and leadership. Service-learning, if properly understood, can help re-create the functional communities that renowned University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman wrote about as being vital to increasing the amount of "social capital" generated by schools.

Learning In Deed: Service-Learning And Preservice Teacher Education, Jeffrey B. Anderson

Service Learning, General

Progressive teacher education programs face a pair of daunting yet crucial tasks. New teachers must be prepared to function effectively in schools as they exist today. They also must be educated to take a leadership role in the improvement and restructuring of P-12 education to meet students’ and society’s needs more fully. Service-learning appears to have considerable potential as a method to achieve both these goals.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation believes that meaningful service to the community, combined with curriculum-based learning, builds stronger academic skills, encourages lifelong civic commitment, and improves workplace and personal development skills among youth. Educators lead …

Highlights From Service-Learning In California's Teacher Education Programs: A White Paper, Andrew Furco, Mary Sue Ammon

Service Learning, General

The purpose of this white paper is to provide a set of recommendations for advancing service-learning in California's Teacher Education programs. The recommendations are based on the findings from a three-year study conducted by UC Berkeley's Service-Learning Research & Development Center (SLRDC). This paper reports on the viability of various approaches for advancing K-12 service-learning in teacher education, identifies institutional barriers that hinder the advancement of service-learning in teacher education, and describes successful approaches that institutions have used to advance service-learning in teacher education. The recommendations provided in this paper are intended to inform the California Department of Education and …

Service Learning Is The Great Connector, Jane Angelis

Service Learning, General

It isn't a coincidence that older people are flocking to learn about computers, the Internet, and E-mail. It's a part of the service-learning movement that has caught America's imagination. Why are older people, technology and service learning such natural partners? Ask a middle-school student who is teaching a computer class to older people. "Some senior citizens are afraid of computers in the beginning," he says, "But we know how to make them more comfortable." That confidence is the hallmark of service-learning programs across the country involving elementary, middle school, high school, and college campuses. William Butler Yeats wrote that ':Education …

A New Model Of Connected Learning, Justine K. Brown

Service Learning, General

Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor always dreamed of building a new type of high school. Throughout his many years in public education as a teacher and administrator, Washor felt that high schools were failing to meet the true needs of students, their families and the community as a whole. Littky imagined building a school that approached learning in a new way, making it a true hands-on experience and involving more than just students and teachers in the process.

Mandatory Community Service: Citizenship Education Or Involuntary Servitude?, Susan M. Anderson

Service Learning, General

A popular topic of conversation lately among parents, educators, policymakers, students and the media is the isolation of young people from their communities. Many people feel schools have a responsibility to build bridges among diverse populations of children and youth, provide nonviolent problem-solving experiences and promote positive activities for young people, even during after-school hours. Involving young people in community service is seen as one potential solution. Indeed, some citizens and educators would like to ensure that all students — including those least likely to participate voluntarily but most likely to benefit from the experience — have the opportunity to …

Service-Learning Is A Feminist Issue: Transforming Communication Pedagogy, Eleanor M. Novek

Service Learning, General

How do we "do" emancipatory feminist teaching when we have not observed it or experienced it ourselves? The author argues here that service-learning is a useful strategy for feminist communication educators to begin challenging the power relationships of traditional pedagogy. Pioneered in the 1960s and '70s, this pairing of traditional course work with community service is now used as a learning model in schools around the nation. Because service-learning allows educators to forge relational links between ourselves, our students, our neighbors, and the communities in which we live, it deserves careful consideration from feminist educators.

National Service And The Internet: Building Bridges To Collaboration, Anne M. Ostberg

Service Learning, General

The national service fellow examined how Unified State Plans proposed using the Internet to facilitate collaboration, and how existing state service Web sites reflected the collaboration discussed in Unified State Plans.

Forty-eight states have Unified State Plans for National and Community Service. These plans include as partners several entities: the state commission for national and community service, the Corporation for National Service state office, the state education agency, representatives of higher education, and other representatives of volunteer and service programs. The majority of Unified State Plans (79 percent) propose using the Internet to accomplish goals toward achieving a broad vision …

How Can Service-Learning Strengthen Tutoring Partnerships?, Jennifer Arndt, Bob Seidel

Service Learning, General

Tutoring is usually volunteer service done to benefit learners and their communities. Tutoring should be a partnership between tutor and student. The partnership should also include the teacher, the student's family or household, the school, the tutoring program, and other tutors and students. All of these people and institutions have an interest in the success of the tutoring endeavor. All have something to contribute and something to gain. These relationships might not always be apparent to everyone involved. But if tutoring programs see all involved as learners and teachers, they can illuminate these relationships and strengthen them.

The Status Of Service-Learning In The United States: Some Facts And Figures, Robert D. Shumer, Charles C. Cook

Service Learning, General

This report focuses on service and service-learning in high schools. The report compares data from 1984 research with information from two studies of service and service-learning completed in 1997. The data suggest that community service and service-learning in 1984 was available in slightly more than one-quarter of all high schools (primarily to white students), and course-related programs (service-learning) occurred in only about 10% of all schools. The 1997 data indicate that the number of high school students involved in service-related programs has increased 686%; and the number of high school students involved in service-learning has increased3,663%. Using data from studies …

The Emerging Role Of Service Learning At Jesuit Universities, James J. Fleming

Service Learning, General

We Jesuits love teaching! We are alive when we are in the classroom. The art of teaching-and it is an art in the truest sense-is a medium in which we can create. "When it is most radical," as Madeleine Grumet has so eloquently observed, teaching as a "work of art simultaneously draws the viewer to it, engaging expectations, memories, recognitions; and then interrupts the viewer's customary response, contradicting expectations with new possibilities, violating memories, displacing recognition with estrangement." This is what the learning process can be: seductive, surprising, and transforming.

Applying Theory To Community Service: A Boyeristic Model, Lyle Flint

Service Learning, General

In 1994 fifty faculty members, representing various departments and colleges at Ball State University, met and, for several days, discussed Boyer's (1990), Scholarship Reconsidered The result of these discussions was, A Different Dawn, a proposal seeking a reconsideration of the traditional lines of scholarly productivity. While a full implementation of Boyer's model has not yet appeared in governance documentation, particularly promotion and tenure documentation, at Ball State it has been embraced by the administration and by a large number of the faculty. Central to Boyer's model is the call for service to the community outside of the academy.

Inside A Swiss Army Knife: An Assessment Of Americorps, James L. Perry, Ann Marie Thomson, Mary Tschirhart, Debra Mesh, Geunjoo Lee

Service Learning, General

This study reviews the goals and achievements of AmeriCorps, the national service program championed by President Clinton and approved by Congress in 1993. We identify five AmeriCorps goals: satisfying unmet social needs, developing corps members, enhancing the civic ethic, reinvigorating lethargic bureaucracies, and bridging race and class. The evidence of AmeriCorps' effectiveness is not definitive. Self-reports from recipient programs, selective cost-benefit analyses, and some survey evidence indicate some positive results. More fine-grained survey and field research raise questions about AmeriCorps' overall effects. Much more research is needed before policy makers and citizens can determine AmeriCorps' productivity.

Introduction To Service-Learning, Augsburg College

Service Learning, General

Information for Education students making a difference in our community (EDU 265, EDU 210).

The National Society For Experiential Education Research Collaborative, National Society For Experiential Education

Service Learning, General

The National Society for Experiential Education is embarking on a new endeavor to advance our understanding of how experiential education impacts learning, teaching, and schooling in various contexts and communities. This endeavor, called the NSEE Research Collaborative, will convene national and local researchers to collaborate on a large-scale, multifaceted research study that will investigate various issues in experiential education.

Opinion: The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, And Activist Research, Ellen Cushman

Service Learning, General

While I support the good intentions of those who have recently proposed definitions of the public intellectual, I find these definitions problematic in their narrow delineation of the word "public"- they focus on a "public" consisting of middle and upper class policy makers, administrators, and professionals, and, in doing so, omit an important site for uniting knowledge-making and political action: the local community.

Self-Assessment Rubric For The Institutionalization Of Service-Learning In Higher Education, Andrew Furco

Service Learning, General

The Self-Assessment Rubric for the Institutionalization of Service-Learning in Higher Education was designed to assist members of the higher education community in gauging the progress of their service-learning institutionalization efforts on their campus.

The rubric is structured by five dimensions that are considered by most service-learning experts to be key factors for higher education service-learning institutionalization. Each dimension is comprised of several components that characterize the dimension. For each component, a threestage continuum of development has been established. Progression from Stage One: Critical Mass Building to Stage Three: Sustained Institutionalization suggests that the institution is moving closer to fully institutionalizing …

Service-Learning For Preservice Teachers: Ethical Dilemmas For Practice, David M. Donahue

Service Learning, General

Increasingly in the United States, service-learning is being used to educate preservice teachers. Service varies greatly in its ethical foundation, however, and service-learning presents new teachers with a variety of dilemmas revealing the moral and political nature of teaching and service. This article presents one case of four preservice teachers writing curriculum as a service to a community agency hoping to promote service geared toward social justice among high school students. The case highlights ethical dilemmas faced by teachers in the process and illustrates the potential of service-learning to educate teachers for the moral imperative of their profession.

Educational Excellence For All Children Act Of 1999, U.S. Department Of Education

Service Learning, General

The President announced that he would shortly send to the Congress the "Educational Excellence for All Children Act of 1999," his proposal to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). This legislation reaffirms the critical role of the Federal Government in working with schools, school districts, and States to promote educational excellence for all children. Every child, parent, grandparent, and taxpayer deserves high quality public schools in their communities.

More specifically, the proposal would build on the 1994 ESEA reauthorization, which established the core principle that disadvantaged children should achieve to the same challenging academic standards as …