Service-Learning Australia

Service-learning commonly starts with students’ examining problems in their community. However if this is the starting point, students may get a very negative image and feel demoralized and helpless.  This is particularly true for students living in areas that are portrayed by the media as communities with “difficulties”.

Students need to see themselves as resilient.  Therefore it is best to start from an asset base, where students focus on their abilities and strengths and the positive aspects of their community.   In the first phase of service-learning, we recommend that students identify their “talents” and recognise that they can make a difference.  They then identify the “treasures” in their community (for example, the local park, clubs, churches, significant buildings etc) and understand that it is a positive place to live.  Finally, they think about ways in which they can give their time in meaningful activities that will contribute to the common good.  We call this TTT (Triple T) – where students give their “talent, treasure and time for the common good”.  This creates the vision, confidence, commitment and unity within the classroom upon which a service-learning project can be built.  Templates that guide students through this process are in the TTT Templates Section of the TTT Module of this site.

Additional exercises that can help students identify their talents are:  Identity Plaque, Acts of Kindness and Magic Lamp.

Those of you who are starting to consider service-learning as pedagogy will want to consider projects that are more easily managed.  You might encourage your students to think about projects:

• within the school community
• that develop existing links with the local community (e.g. the local aged care facility that is already visited by the school.)
• that extend existing programs (e.g. Anzac Day, Clean Up Australia Day, Winter Appeals etc.)

Of course, your students could look further afield at service activities that are more global.  The important thing is that students are engaged in activities that they and the community find meaningful, with service goals they can reach and curriculum objectives they can achieve.  The activities should also provide students with the opportunity to identify and analyse different points of view and to understand and respect the diversity of others who are providing the service as well as those being served.

It is critical that you do not simply “look for service-learning ideas”, or your students do not just guess community needs, but that a thoughtful analysis is conducted.  This will involve:

• research – (newspaper reviews, internet searches etc.)
• interviews (people in aged care facilities, local councilors, owners of businesses that are along a nearby stream etc)
• surveys (developing survey questions in English) and analyzing the results (in maths developing bar charts, pie charts, looking at fractions and percentages),
• school mapping or community mapping (where students walk around their community, or along a local stream, or in the school yard noting what is going on in the environment),
• brainstorming
• discussing issues with family and neighbours and reporting on these discussions.

In this way, service-learning will be real and grounded in the world.

From the range of community needs that your students identify, they must now select a broad area of need on which they would like to focus, for example, working with the aged or an aspect of the environment (e.g. water conservation.)  You need to consider the decision-making processes you use to assist students in selecting an area of need.