Lessons Learned about Service-Learning

Jay's Introduction

When I read the voices in this paper, I literally wept. This was what I always wanted to do as a teacher, but was never allowed to try. Books and tests seemed more important than life and experience. These folks caught the vision and ran with it.

This is a wonderful look at a way to improve community life and the lives of everyone involved. Work like this can be done in many settings, not just school. In many ways, it mirrors the result we want to see from our Improving Health Initiative.

Unfortunately, this is only a paper about lessons learned in applying a system that is not really outlined here. I will look about for the actual system and abstract it in time.

Abstract

Introduction

Quality service-learning transforms students, schools and communities. Service-learning creates powerful learning experiences for students and strengthens ties between schools and community. While integrating curricular goals with a real community need, service-learning gives students the power and the voice to work for social change in their world. It engages them in their own learning process. Students become active learners and creators of history who have opportunities to realize their collective and personal power to make a difference. In order to engage in this kind of learning, teachers together with students must work to establish quality partnerships and collaboration with community organizations and community volunteers. Everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner.

Service-learning, and our whole educational system, get stronger when we seize opportunities to share our experiences together. Lessons Learned is based on interviews with teachers, students and their community partners who are doing service-learning in Saint Paul Public Schools. Among other things, they reclaimed a wetland, advocated for human rights, lobbied Congressional leaders, removed an invasive plant species and tailor-made Spanish books for children in El Salvador and Guatemala. In doing so, they learned a lot about service-learning -– the educational methodology that made it all possible: both their learning and the community change that grew out of (and also supplied a large portion of) their learning.

This document contains the lessons learned that they’d like to pass on to you. The work that provided these lessons has paved the way for Saint Paul’s “Plan for District-Wide Service-Learning” which grew out of local and national research, including more than a dozen focus groups. The plan, written by a specially convened task force, recommends hearty support for service-learning but stops short of a mandate. The goal is that every student every year would participate in service-learning.

Lessons learned about what it’s like to learn this way:

Students Voices

• It’s all about learning and helping people at the same time, which is more fun because it’s real. When we know that what we do helps other people and makes them happy, it makes us happy too. This helps us realize the value of our work and we do it better.
• It’s nice to work on something when you don’t know exactly what is going to happen next, there are lots of surprises as things unfold. This makes learning exciting.
• We get to learn in different ways. It’s not so much just out of the book all the time. We get to do things that are fun and important.
• We got to really see what was happening about our issue, not just listen to somebody talk about it.
• Doing service-learning taught me a lot about how other kids around the world live and the conditions. I realized how lucky I am to have food, clothes and shelter.
• You get comfortable sharing your ideas with others and if it doesn’t work out, you have to work that out too. This gives us a chance to see what we can really do.
• We learned how to talk with each other about what was important to us and why. More people were engaged in the discussion. It was really fun that we all got to work on what we wanted to do. We were much more engaged in our own learning.
• We had to do a lot of preparat ion work before we could do the project and then we got to really do it.

Community Partner Voices

• It gives people something they can be a part of. It helps them see that they can make a difference–what they do and say is important.
• Kids come alive as their own gifts and hard work are needed and recognized. You can feel the change happening.

Volunteer Voices

• The class gives young people the opportunity to look at issues that concern them and know that they can make a difference. Maybe they can’t change the world, but they can begin to look for solutions. They can look at the steps and learn the process. Service-learning teaches students about solidarity in a global society.
• It helps breakdown stereotypes about how the neighborhood sees youth. When the students delivered flyers about their topic to neighborhood homes, many people talked with students for the first time.

Teacher Voices

• Service-learning nurtures a life-long commitment to civic participation and social justice issues. Students learn to decipher and understand complex social issues in our society. It allows us all to see a different way of thinking.
• When students are engaged in public problem solving, they learn about the issue of power and who has it. Students learn how to analyze and access power. They learn how to think carefully and strategically. They study power in relationships. They get informed, organized, and make allies. They learn how to shift their relationships with decision makers.
• This is long lasting and important work. Too many people see students as test takers and passive participants in their own education. Service-learning changes that.

Lessons Learned about Youth Voice and Leadership

Community Partner Voice

• The stronger the youth voice the better the project.
• Everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner.
• Student involvement in planning, design and execution makes the work genuinely theirs. If there’s trust between students and teachers it lightens the load of the teacher.
• We help students challenge the status quo in the classroom. We help them develop the skills so they can be the drivers of the process and directors of their own education.
• Our goal is for youth to be engaged in doing such great and important work that adults take notice of it and start taking them seriously. We don’t want young people to be just token youth on boards.
• Our goal is for youth to be engaged in doing such great and important work that adults take notice of it and start taking them seriously. We don’t want young people to be just token youth on boards.

Volunteer Voices

• People need to take kids more seriously. Service-learning needs to be more than a grant write-off, more than a proud showcase for the grownups to point at, and say “let’s pat these nice kids on the head.” It needs to be much deeper than that. Service-learning is a way to allow kids to have the voice and the power they need to really make significant changes.

Teacher Voices

• It is amazing to start with the kids’ own experiences and go from there, taking it to the next level. It is important work to let students think for themselves about their beliefs and decide what to do. Service-learning is the teaching I have always wanted to do.
• Students hold class meetings, brainstorm ideas, and come up with many different ideas. They learn about the democrat ic process. Not everyone can get exactly what he or she wants, but everyone has a role to play.
• Listen to the young people, you don’t really know what kind of impact you’ll have on them until you ask them to do things. It’s amazing how they shine. It’s amazing to see different people shine at different times. They all have different gifts. Kids who are school smart aren’t always the leaders. They are not always the ones volunteering to do things. You can’t really predict what they are going to show you.
• It’s hard to plan for youth voice and at the same time allow for it to emerge naturally.
• It’s so hard to have multiple groups in the same classroom-it’s hard to manage. And yet, if you only have one topic, it’s hard to allow for maximum youth voice.
• Kids can do amazing things.

Lessons Learned about Collaboration

Effective service-learning partnerships draw schools back into the community and the community back into schools.

What we really need:

1. Stronger volunteer commitment,
2. Greater administrative involvement and support,
3. Clear and consistent student voice and
4. More curriculum integration.

“I like to use the example about the empty building’s window getting broken: if it doesn’t get fixed it tel ls people that it’s OK. We have to teach people that we all have a role in taking care of our community. People need to learn not to break the window in the first place, to fix it if it does get broken and to work together to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
–Student

Lessons Learned from Parent Involvement

Volunteer Voices

• Promote and engage parents more. Make use of their skills and expertise. They can do so much more than help supervise field trips. Draw more on your “in-house” expertise, it makes a difference for the kids when you really get the parents (and other t eachers) involved.
• Don’t settle for parental involvement. Go for actual participation, and even leadership.

Lessons Learned about Collaboration within the School.

• Teacher: School structures can be very disempowering for students. Here they are planning a presentation to our Senator–providing real and independent leadership–and then they have to stop and ask me for permission to go the restroom. Do I break school rules and let them act like the responsible people we want them to be or do I respect protocol and make them ask me to write out a pass?
• Teacher: Students need to be a central part of the discussion and decisions that are being made about service-learning at the district level.
• Teacher: I think it’s totally possible to involve all kids when you do service-learning. I include deaf and hard of hearing students, English language learners and students who are mentally impaired. Service-learning compels you to include everyone. Still, it does take collaboration within the school to support teachers and students so full inclusion can be successful.
• Community Partner: There is a knee jerk reaction, almost a paranoia, about teachers not producing students who can compete in real world situations. Schools fall prey to tremendous pressure, which–ironically–puts them in a straight jacket about creatively and intuitively using service-learning to give students the skills they will need to compete in the real world.
• Teacher: I’ve learned that we need more scheduling flexibility in the schools, pure and simple.
• Teacher: It’s ideal to keep administrators in the ‘service-learning loop.’ But when they just don’t get it (despite all my attempts) I’ve learned that if I don’t ask their permission, they can’t say no.
• Community Partner: It’s amazing what teachers can do when they are given the proper tools, but they need on-going support . Administ rators can help make that happen. They need to be more understanding of the service- learning process, more supportive of the teachers . . . and they need to give kids more of the credit. Districts must allocate resources for t ransportat ion, administrative leadership, and ongoing teacher training (especially for new teachers).

Lessons Learned about Meeting Real Community Needs

Advice for STUDENTS

• Have fun.
• Don’t think of yourselves as ‘just kids.’ Start slowly and work to see how far you can go. We never thought we’d be lobbying congressional leaders in DC.
• You have to really learn about your issue and you have to learn about each other. Share what your gifts and talents are. Where do you shine? Where do you need help? Learn how to talk about your strengths and limitations.
• Learn where to go to find information.
• Teachers don’t give you all the answers. They can give you ideas about what to do, but the work is up to you and your group.
• Being flexible doesn’t hurt, either.
• Sometimes it feels overwhelming and like you’ll never be able to learn enough to educate others about your issue. Sometimes it feels like you’ll never have enough time to be able to make a difference. Don’t give up.
• Remember that you are in charge of your own learning.
• Open your eyes to other issues that are related to your topic. Everything is interwoven; nothing is independent to itself.
• Be ready to make community contacts. Watch out because some people don’t show proper respect to young voices on the phone, so you have to be prepared. Practice role-playing with your friends what you want to communicate in phone calls to organizations.
• Sometimes planning can feel like it’s taking forever. Don’t rush it because it makes a solid foundation.
• Remember that young people are only the leaders of tomorrow if they procrastinate.
• You cannot do it all overnight. It takes time, hard work, and lots of patience.
• Don’t think that celebration can only be done by adults: celebrate early and often.
• Tell your family and friends–they may decide to join you.

Advice for COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS

• Be practical about how to interact with schools. Get support from the administration, but figure out who to connect with and how to make it work as well as how to keep it working if teachers leave. Look for committed teachers and other allies with similar values.
• Recruit volunteers who don’t mind that service-learning is often re-creat ed into something different every year. All teachers do it in their own way, as well. We have a much easier time recruiting volunteers for tutoring and reading programs. Because I can’t tell the volunteers exactly what they will be doing, they need to be flexible and committed enough to weather the ups and downs.
• It’s a long process to build alliances. You have to stay with it. It’s easy to get frustrat ed with short term vision.
• Be very flexible. This allows you to shi ft and change within a somet imes volat ile s chool environment.
• We all have our own agenda. We need to help each other out more. Increase teamwork and levels of trust. We need to work together to build a common agenda–you need to be willing to give your time and services to partners in order to get something back. This is how you build strong relationships that lead to strong alliances.

General Advice for ALL PARTNERS

• Be prepared to raise your expectations.
• Passion is a prerequisite, but it cannot be the sustaining force.
• Spend enough time developing the process, making it a quality effort.
• Start small, perfect your program before you try and reach everyone.
• In the long run, keep it simple, this allows for more people to participate.
• When you invite new energy to come in, you increase power by giving it away.
• Build and maintain alliances that allow you to have independence.
• Don’t be afraid to assert your values. If you are authentic and aligned with what you believe, you will gain credibility. Don’t try to do things just to fit in.
• Create a system that can be updated easily to keep track of your allies and efforts. You can only plan so much, you must also let the process unfold.
• It costs money.
• Don’t give up.
• Trust intuition and synergy above other approaches in the long run. It’s important to plan but being able to read the signs for an opportunity allows you the freedom to seize the moment.
• It’s important to take a rest and take care of you. You need to try and keep your work out of your personal life, which is especially hard to do when it is so engaging.
• Be prepared to be surprised.