Service Learning Commons^™

Students Help In The Naturalization Of Elders, Nina Gibson

Intergenerational

Many of our elderly citizenship students are struggling to get ready to take the naturalization exam. To help these learners, a collaborative effort between City College and San Francisco State University called Project SHINE began last fall and has doubled in size this semester. Credit students from the Phelan campus and from San Francisco State University are coming out to our campuses to tutor seniors studying in our citizenship classes. The tutors receive credit in an academic class for their work as part of service learning. They have agreed to attend one citizenship class per week under the supervision of …

On Civil Education: Beginning A Dialogue, Laura Martino, Erik W. Robelen

Civic Engagement

In his recent book, The End of Work, economist and political activist Jeremy Rifkin describes the dramatic shift the global economy is undergoing as we enter the next century. Rifkin documents the move from a mass worker economy to a high technology global economy that thrives on the innovations of labor-saving technology and corporate downsizing. "In the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors," he writes, "machines are quickly replacing human labor and promise an economy of near automated production by the mid-decades of the twenty-first century." Rifkin argues that government is also offering fewer employment opportunities, and that the rising high-tech …

Community Service And Political Identity Development In Adolescence, Miranda Yates, James Youniss

Civic Engagement

This article addresses the interconnection of political socialization and identity development. We begin with Erikson 's work, which identified the development of political commitment in adolescence as a key aspect of identity formation. We then seek to shed light on the social processes through which youth become engaged in political activities and issues. We discuss the influences of family and peers as well as participation in community service and other civic activities. The development of social responsibility and agency, and an understanding of the complexity of social issues are considered as important facets of political commitment. Data from a case …

Cis Middle School Community Service Handbook 1998-99, Cis Middle School

Curriculum

Our educational philosophy stresses the development of the whole person. Its concerns extend beyond the focus on academic and intellectual achievement and encourage responsible citizenship in the world outside the classroom.

Citizenship And Young People's Role In Public Life, Melissa Bass

Civic Engagement

Young people play many roles in public life. They are activists and entrepreneurs, officeholders and voters, taxpayers and consumers, advocates and beneficiaries. They are also, first and foremost, citizens.

In its narrowest, most technical sense, citizenship is something that we are born with. In its richest sense, it is something we can work our entire lives toward making real.

Many of our public roles happen to us. We become taxpayers when we get our first jobs. We are customers when we stand in line at the DMV. But some of our public roles require a little more effort. In order …

Service Learning: Connecting Citizenship With The Classroom, Mary Ellen Brandell, Shelly Hinck

Civic Engagement

Has the effective teaching of writing changed for the better, remained much the same, or become worse in the last 20 years? Have the major obstacles to the effective teaching of writing been removed? This 20- year follow-up examines the question.

Proactive Citizenship And Service Learning At Anoka High School, William Mittlefehldt

School K-12

Change is the central process in all schools. Students change because of biological and social forces. Schools change because of the social and economic changes in their students. staff. and communities. The communities that support our schools change in demographics, economics, and politics. Those forces make teaching the value and the skills of citizenship extremely challenging. Change threatens to erode our common ground; it undermines our shared assumptions.

Educational Policy Through Service Learning: Preparation For Citizenship And Civic Participation, Susan G. Forman, Louise C. Wilkinson

Civic Engagement

This article describes a course designed to prepare undergraduate students to participate effectively in civic life and in public decisions about education and schooling. The course includes an examination of the theoretical and conceptual basics of civic responsibility and service learning, and a review of the process of educational policy making, and an in·depth exploration of a number of current educational policy issues. The course is taught with service learning pedagogy. Experiences in a service placement yield personal knowledge that has the potential to inform students' critical analysis of theoretical, research, and policy literature and to make students more effective …

Service Learning And Democratic Citizenship, Richard Battistoni

Service Learning, General

Over the course of this semester I have become a citizen of New Brunswick. It could be argued that I was a citizen here well before registering for the course, but I did not feel as if I were one. Having taken the course, I now know why I must work for change, and never accept the status quo - things can always be better. I am now aware of what is happening around me. New Brunswick extends beyond the [campus] bus route. It is filled with people who need aid, people who give aid. people who cannot be bothered …

What We Know About Engendering Civic Identity, James Youniss, Jeffrey A. Mclellan, Miranda Yates

Civic Engagement

Taking the position that there is a developmental process in the formation of citizenship, the authors reviewed studies that reported a link between youth's participation in organized activities and civic behaviors 15 or more years later in adulthood. Data uniformly showed that students who participated in high school government or community service projects, meant in the broad sense, are more likely to vote and to join community organizations than are adults who were nonparticipants during high school. Results support the authors' view that participation during the youth era can be seminal in the construction of civic identity that includes a …

Educating A Committe Citizenry, Faith Gabelnick

Higher Education

If we want our students to acquire the democratic virtues of honesty, tolerance. empathy. generosity. teamwork, and social responsibility, we have to demonstrate those qualities not only in our individual professional conduct but also in our institutional policies," writes Alexander Astin in "What Higher Education Can Do in the Cause of Citizenship"' (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 6, 1995).

The Work Of Citizenship And The Problem Of Service-Learning, Harry C. Boyte, James Farr

Civic Engagement

The debates about service learning are not merely internecine squabbles between educators over methods and manners of out-of-class instruction. Or at least they don't have to be. For they reflect and are implicated in broader debates about community service and civic education more generally, as well as about citizenship, public policy, and even our understandings of American democracy and history. Take a couple of snapshots of these broader debates, now and then.

Experiential Education And Civic Learning, Robert H. Mckenzie

Civic Engagement

The nature of civic learning not only demands experiential education; civic learning reinforces for us the nature of experiential education. To explore the relationship between the two, we must understand a number of factors: the nature of the contemporary challenges to civic learning; the relationship of the purposes that educational institutions choose to that civic challenge; the pedagogical choices available for learning civically; and the relationship of learning theory to the centrality of choice that lies at the core of civic learning. At the end of this investigation, we will find some important guiding principles that civic learning suggests for …

Civic Declaration, American Civic Forum

Civic Engagement

This document contains: Background; Call for a New Citizenship; The Challenge; The New Citizenship: Civic Stories; From Me to We: The Lessons of Civic Stories; and The American Civic Forum.

Fairy Tale Friends, Mary Chamberlain

Special Topics, General

As students grow into responsible citizens. they need to realize that the quality of their lives is affected by the quality of the relationships in their lives.

This Community Service learning Unit - Fairy Tale Friends - was designed as part of the language Arts, English and Reading, curriculum. Middle School students will work on a Fairy Tale Unit. They will learn characteristics of Fairy Tales and fiction, using strategies of the writing/reading process. and cooperative learning. After the completion of the unit, they will work with elementary students, helping them write Fairy Tales.

Part two of their instruction will …

Administering Maturity: The Emergence Of Youth Service As A Rite Of Passage To Adult Citizenship, Timothy Dolan

School K-12

Over the course of the 1980s, a literature describing a new lost generation in America has caught the popular imagination, fueled to no small extent by the anxiety of aging baby-boomers over their offspring's fate. One manifestation of particular interest at the policy level has been a growing sentiment by opinion leaders in favor of establishing youth service as both a pragmatic remedy for meeting social needs, and as a rite of passage to bona-fide citizenship status.

The Next Literacy: Educating Young Americans For Work And Citizenship, David Fleming

Civic Engagement

The emerging global economy presents the American workforce with many challenges. As national economic borders disintegrate and U.S. manufacturing jobs disappear, more and more opportunities are opening up in "complex services" (insurance, engineering, law, finance, computer programming, advertising) and "person-to-person service" (re- . tail, education, health care). Many of these new jobs offer high-skill, high-wage work; unfortunately, the majority of American workers lack the education and training for them. What those workers·are left with are an increasing number of low-skill, low-wage, nonunion jobs. One feature of this economy, then, is a growing split between the few who are benefiting from …

Democracy's Next Generation, Donna Fowler

Civic Engagement

A recent study conducted for People For the American Way recommends three ways schools can help students develop the values and habits of responsible citizenship.

Teaching Twenty-First Century Citizenship: Social Psychological Foundations, Allan R. Brandhorst

Civic Engagement

Effective American (U.S.) citizenship in the Twenty-first century may require a shift in the value orientation which currently characterizes American life. Two components of the American value system are becoming increasingly dysfunctional. American social science, and accordingly the social studies curriculum, has become narrowly focused on an economic model of human decision-making. Such a one-dimensional model of man, because it invalidates by omission justice-based models of decision-making, leaves American society with a reduced capacity for addressing social dilemmas, particularly commons-type problems. Secondly, American cultural life has been dominated by a heavy and one-sided commitment to primary control. Such an imbalance, …

The Civic Mission Of The University, Benjamin R. Barber

Civic Engagement

The modern American university is embroiled in controversy, fueled by deep uncertainty over its pedagogical purposes and its civic role in a "free" society. At times the college establishment seems to know neither what a free society is not what the educational requisites of freedom might look like. Nonetheless, both administrators and their critics have kept busy, for like zealots (classically defined as people who redouble their efforts when they have forgotten their aims), they have covered their confusion by embellishing their hyperbole. They wring hands and rue the social crises of higher education... apathy, cynicism, careerism, prejudice, selfishness, sexism, …

Youth Entering Service To America, Yes To America

Civic Engagement

George Bush announced today his proposal for the creation of Youth Entering Service to America, a challenge grant program designed to spur more young people to serve their communities as a continuing androutine part of their daily lives in high schools, college, and after graduation.

The Effects Of A Community Involvement Program On Adolescent Student's Citizenship Attitudes, Stuart Harold Stockhaus

Thesis, Dissertations, Student Creative Activity, and Scholarship

Upon looking at any of the many lists of social studies instructional objectives. one can hardly avoid finding an objective called citizenship. A National Council for the Social Studies sponsored publication on civic education states, "In one sense, desirable citizenship traits in a democratic society remain the same today, in the midst of rapid cultural change. as they were hundreds of years ago. Effective participation by the individual in public affairs continues to require the same four essentials: knowledge. thought. commitment, and action. In application, however. each generation redefines good citizenship to fit demands of the times."

Fostering Civic Responsibility, Constitutional Rights Foundation

Civic Engagement

This issue features: Fostering Civic Responsibility Through Service Learning; Program Profiles; and CityWorks: A Curriculum Model for Teaching Local Government Through Research and Service Learning.