ASCD Education Update
August 1993 | Volume35| Number6
Learning Through Service
Students at North Carroll Middle School in Hampstead, Md., are no strangers to community service. Through a program offered by their school, many of them volunteer at a nearby nursing home, says social studies teacher Craig Giles. After receiving six hours of training, students pay visits to the nursing home on their own time, to assist and socialize with the residents. Then, once a month, the students meet for a “reflection session” to discuss their experiences and share suggestions. Last year, forty 8th graders participated in the program. “They love it,” Giles reports. “They enjoy doing what they perceive as an adult job.”
As a high school student, Bob Giannino also volunteered at a nursing home. Today, he's a program consultant at the Thomas Jefferson Forum at Tufts University, which coordinates student service projects. From the senior citizens he helped, Giannino learned much more about the Depression and the two World Wars than he could have from reading textbooks, he says.
Giannino also participated in other service activities while in high school: tutoring, environmental clean-ups, and political service (as a student member of the school board). While he found much of his classroom learning—“reading Hawthorne and learning about the Civil War,” for example—hard to relate to his own experiences, service activities provided him “an opportunity to bring some reality to everyday school life.”
As these examples reflect, many students are eager to help others in their community, and when they do, they benefit from the experience. Students who serve others actually helpthemselvesmost, advocates of service learning believe.
More and more schools are using service activities to support learning, experts say. In fact, the state of Maryland and two dozen school districts around the country nowrequirestudents to perform community service. Mandatory service learning remains controversial, however.
What Students Do
In well-designed service learning programs, students do more than ladle out soup to the homeless or pick up trash in public parks, experts say. They apply what they've learned in the classroom, develop leadership and communication skills, become more caring and responsible citizens—and help meet community needs in the process.
Service learning activities are extremely diverse. Students work at hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and day-care centers. They promote recycling efforts, monitor air and water quality, and clean up pollution. They plant bulbs in parks and supervise recreational play. They tutor other students, check people's blood pressure, and raise money for charities. They advocate civic action and lobby their elected officials.
Tutoring is a common service activity. Middletown High School in Middletown, Md., for example, offers a course for students who want to be peer tutors, says Joey Hoffman, who teaches the course. Hoffman gives her students “a pretty comprehensive training” in tutoring strategies and topics such as learning disabilities. Then, four days a week, students tutor elementary, middle, and high school students. On the fifth day, the class convenes to discuss their experiences.
Students at Middletown also do projects that combine research and a service activity, Hoffman says. One student developed lessons on saving the Chesapeake Bay and taught them to elementary students. Another student renovated an apartment in a homeless shelter. Other students have developed educational pamphlets on drinking and driving, child abuse, and teen pregnancy.
At Washington Elementary School in Mount Vernon, Wash., every student engages in at least one service project each year, says Kathy Fisk, who teaches 2nd grade. For example, the 2nd graders do composting, while the 3rd graders use the rich, composted soil for beautification projects. The school's 4th graders do cross-age tutoring, and the 5th graders maintain a bird sanctuary (and study birds and migration).
One of the key principles of service learning is providing time for students to reflect on their experiences, experts emphasize. Through discussions, journals, and essays, students should explore the larger dimensions of their service.
“Working in a soup kitchen can be very menial if there's no reflection or discussion,” says Samuel Halperin, who directs the American Youth Policy Forum in Washington, D.C. But when students explore related questions—such as why there is hunger and how our society might combat it— “even the menial can become significant.”
“Reflection is the key,” affirms Alice Halsted of the National Center for Service Learning in Early Adolescence. During the period of service, “there are so many teachable moments, if you can capture them,” she says—especially with early adolescents, who are developing abstract thought. Halsted also emphasizes students' need for preparation and trainingbeforethey do their service.
Supporting Learning
How do service activities support learning? Service learning isactivelearning, advocates emphasize. In fact, the growing interest in service learning stems, in part, from research showing that many students learn especially well through hands-on, experiential activities, Halperin says.
When students have a real purpose for what they do, they are more motivated to learn, says Maggie O'Neill, deputy director of the Maryland Student Service Alliance. In writing a persuasive letter, for example, service learning provides real consequences. In a traditional class, if a student's letter advocating recycling is mediocre, it may get a “C.” In a service learning context, the student won't persuade others to back recycling efforts.
Students want to have authentic experiences, O'Neill adds. They are “tired of the vicarious experiences the classroom provides—filmstrips, somebody else's stories—they want to have their own experiences.”
Because service learning provides a way for students to apply knowledge and skills, it should not be seen as an add-on, experts say. Instead, it should be closely coordinated with the curriculum.
If students serve by monitoring the water quality of a river, for example, they should study related issues in the classroom, Halperin says. How did the stream get polluted? Who pays for pollution? How can we develop good public policy on pollution? “You make the questions real by engaging in the service,” he says. “It makes the curriculum alive.”
Educators can integrate service activities into the curriculum in a variety of ways, experts say. In science classes, students can take on environmental projects, for example. In art classes, students can consider how their art could make life better for people. (They might decide to donate it to a homeless shelter.) In home economics classes, students can use their newly acquired skills in cooking and child care to help those in need.
In teaching a novel or autobiography, an English teacher can help students examine social problems, Hoffman says. The novels of Dickens, for example, explore poverty and the oppression of children. Having students lobby or write letters to the editor about such issues is “a wonderful way of applying what you're learning to today,” she says.
Teams of teachers in Boston schools have used service activities to support interdisciplinary learning, says Pat Barnicle of the Thomas Jefferson Forum. If students serve in a soup kitchen, for example, teachers might organize instruction around the theme of hunger: biology classes could study nutrition; social studies classes could examine hunger throughout history and its causes; English classes could read literature that deals with hunger.
Service learning is trulylearning, advocates emphasize. When students serve, they develop both new skills and positive attitudes. Students who serve learn communication, problem-solving, and leadership skills, says O'Neill. They also learn practical knowledge, such as how to tutor, how to weatherize a window, or how to find their way around community agencies. According to Halperin, service activities teach “the kinds of things employers are looking for: responsibility, teamwork, problem solving, and learning to learn.”
Service activities “reconnect” students to the community, Halsted says. In contrast to our former agrarian society, “we have postponed work for the adolescent,” she points out. “The young are now alone, disconnected from institutions.” Service learning provides “a way to reconnect them, to show them they are people of value.”
The list of benefits to students is long, Hoffman says. They gain a sense of self-esteem; they feel and become more responsible; they stop thinking only of themselves; and they begin to think about solutions, asking: “What canIdo to make a difference?”
Required or Voluntary
In light of these benefits, some advocates contend that schools shouldrequirestudents to participate in service learning activities. ASCD supported required service programs in a resolution passed last March (see box, right). But experts are divided on this issue.
“Pedagogically, it's a real question,” says Halperin, “because kids resist what they're forced to do.” But schools make many things mandatory because they're important, he points out. And students often need a nudge before they become interested in any pursuit, be it geometry, swimming, or community service. The real issue, he believes, is not whether service learning is required but the quality of the experience.
Requiring service learning is “a wonderful idea,” says Giles. “Why should we deny any student the joy of serving?” he asks. “We wouldn't deny them the joy of reading.” Maryland's requirement is not burdensome, he says, because it allows both in-school and out-of-school service. “Students get to choose from all sorts of activities.”
“The whole mandatory/voluntary argument is a red herring,” says Halsted. The students who benefit most from service activities are the ones who would never volunteer, she asserts: “Those who think they're going to hate it end up loving it.” Students who are troublemakers often show great maturity and infinite patience in situations where they are needed, she says. While Halsted concedes that some students may develop a negative attitude about service, she endorses a requirement because the experience is “so good for so many”—and life-changing for some.
Other vehemently disagree. The idea of required service is “a joke—an oxymoron,” says Cynthia Parsons, coordinator of SerVermont in Chester, Vt. “It's very hard to teach anyone what it means to volunteer, in a mandatory program,” she asserts. “I have yet to find a kid who doesn't think compulsory service has a negative effect.”
“Overwhelmingly, the students vote against it,” says Debra Mead of Good Shepherd Services, who runs a community service program at Sarah J. Hale High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. Students say a requirement would devalue the fact that they volunteered, she reports.
Mead also has practical concerns about required service. When unwilling students “mess up,” not only is that one more failure for them—they are also letting someone else down, or even hurting them. “It's not like failing geometry,” she points out. “This affects others.”
Giannino has mixed feelings about a service requirement. He finds “very valid” the argument that requiring service undermines the spirit of it. Having a requirement also “tarnishes” the young people who are really altruistic, he believes, by lumping them with all the others. “An agency won't knowwhyyou're coming to it,” he says— by choice or by compulsion.
If a school system or state does require service, then it should put the onus on schools to integrate it into the curriculum, as in Maryland, Giannino says. It should not be an add-on, where students are told they must serve a certain number of hours and then left to find opportunities through service agencies. (This latter scenario happens all too often, experts admit.)
Requiring service is a good idea, but only if schools are given time to develop high-quality programs, says Bernadette Chi, a CalServe regional coordinator for the California Department of Education. Before a program is launched, teachers must be prepared to integrate service into the curriculum, and students must be oriented. Schools need about four years of preparation to gear up for a mandate, she believes.
“I'm concerned about the slapdash approach” when administrators and school boards get excited about the idea and just do it, Chi says. “If the infrastructure and preparation aren't there, it's going to create a backlash.” Young people might be turned off from service, and service agencies might not want to work with the schools again, she warns.
Schools should start slowly, plan carefully, and consider service agencies' needs and teachers' feelings, Chi advises. They should also seriously explore how students can participate in the decision-making process.
Tapping Idealism
Whether or not service learning is required, advocates are emphatic about its value.
“Young people grow both academically and personally through service learning,” says Barbara Gomez, director of the Service Learning Project of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “It's a win-win situation. You can't go wrong if it's done well.”
“After hearing students discuss their service experiences, “you come away convinced,” Halsted says. “They take on a maturity that is so unexpected, because we don't usually ask it of them. They do incredible things.”
Service learning “taps into kids' idealism,” says O'Neill. They want to take on big problems—end bias or hunger, for example. “Students really do have a lot to offer,” she says. “It's up to us to provide them opportunities by changing how we teach.”
ASCD's Resolution on Service Learning
At the 1993 ASCD Annual Conference, a resolution on service learning was passed that states:...As part of their professional and moral responsibility, educators must move boldly to require all students to participate in service learning and other experiences that develop good character and effective citizenship.... ASCD urges its affiliates and members to take the lead in establishing required service learning programs that include all ages, all students, and, as appropriate, the curriculum and community.