Service-Learning Australia

In every Australian school, students are involved in very valuable community service .  Your students may participate in Clean Up Australia Day, collect money for a bushfire appeal, perform in a concert at the local aged care facility, knit blankets for Winter Appeals, honour return servicemen and women on Anzac Day, etc.  These activities deliver significant benefits to your community and also add to your students’ appreciation of the importance of being socially-engaged citizens.  The focus of this Quality Module is to show you how you can engage your students in valuable community service, while at the same time achieving curriculum outcomes.

In this module, we describe the standards that research has shown deliver good quality service-learning.  In the "Stages" Module, we discuss each stage of designing, implementing and evaluating a service-learning program.  Understanding that you might find the level of detail provided rather daunting, we have a final "Getting Started" Section in this Module. 

In the Getting Started Section, we encourage you to carefully consider the reasons for implementing service-learning – what is your school hoping to achieve by undertaking service-learning; what is the overall focus of service-learning in your school?  Some schools want to improve the analytical ability of their students, which they hope will improve the students’ final results.  Other schools want to increase the academic engagement of their students.  Some schools hope to increase the level of care and concern that students show for others.  In other schools, teachers want to empower their pupils.

Once you have agreed on the overall focus of the program, you can decide on the starting point.  This might be one of the many community service programs that your students are already engaged in, or an area of the curriculum, or special interests of the students etc.  In the Getting Started section, we then show you how to enrich this starting point by including as many of the quality standards as possible, so you can start moving the program towards good quality service-learning.  The "Stages" Module helps you plan each stage of service-learning: Investigation, Planning, Action and Celebration.

It is unlikely that you will achieve excellent-quality service-learning in the first program you implement, but by concentrating on the standards and by paying close attention in monitoring the process and progress of what you do, you will move closer to really good quality service-learning and the benefits this brings students and communities.