Service-Learning Australia

In service-learning, students learn while providing a service, and this learning needs to be intentional.  Therefore, it is essential that students take the time to understand the community they are serving, to identify the “talents” within that community and to recognize and appreciate what they will learn from interactions. Students need to ask themselves, for example “What are the talents of the group of people I am serving?  What are their treasures?  What are their traditions, cultures, beliefs? What can I learn from them?”  A collaborative partnership is formed and students learn to respect the diversity of the group being served (two of the quality standards for service-learning).  Therefore, students involved in service-learning do not have the common “missionary” attitude of doing service “to” or “for”, but rather have the attitude of doing service “with”. 
 
Students also need to be prepared for their work with the service recipients: they need to understand their roles, have the skills and information required and be sensitive to the people with whom they will be working.  As in Stage 1 (Investigation), students may need to continue to reflect on some of their own values and attitudes and some of the stereotypes they believe.

High School Example: Students doing Food Technology.

This example shows how a traditional volunteering/community service program where students provide “comfort to the aged” changes into a service-learning program where students identify the “talents and treasures” of the elderly, research their backgrounds, respect their diversity and value what can be learnt from them.

Service goals must be achievable.

When deciding on a service goal, it is essential to think about whether it will be achievable, considering the time and resources available to your students.  For example, students in a primary school were concerned about pollution in a nearby stream.  For a number of reasons, the teacher thought it would be very difficult for students to have a significant impact on the level of pollution, so the students instead focused on educating the local community about polluting the stream.  The need they were addressing was not primarily the polluted stream, but a public that was uneducated about pollution in the stream.  As their “baseline”, students measured community awareness of pollution in the stream and the actions the public took to reduce this pollution before their project.  They then conducted a public education campaign for the community, businesses along the stream and the local council.  They finally measured public awareness after their campaign.

Service-learning is pedagogy.

It is a method for achieving curriculum outcomes.  Look at the number of curriculum outcomes that will be achieved by your students in their service activity.  Involve your students - discuss the learning goals and the way in which the service activities can help them achieve these goals. Then identify curriculum outcomes that may not be achieved through service-learning – these will need a more traditional approach.  Also be prepared to take advantage of the many, unexpected “teaching opportunities” that will occur during the project.

There are very simple templates to help you identify curriculum outcomes that can be achieved through the service-learning projects that your students have chosen.  These are “Embedding TTT Projects into Key Learning Areas” and “Embedding TTT Projects into the Curriculum”.  These templates are in both the “Getting Started” section of this Module and the “TTT Templates” Section of the “TTT Module”.

Examples of a similar need, but different service activities.

In the following two cases, the need in the school community was very similar:  a need for an improved level of school maintenance.  Each group of students decided on very different projects to address this community need.   In each project students achieved their service goals and their learning goals.

• The majority of students in one school wanted to reduce the level of vandalism in the school.
• The majority of students in another school wanted to improve the standard of the boys’ and girls’ toilet blocks.
  
  

In service-learning, your students must achieve a full range of learning goals and service goals.  To know how well these goals are being achieved, you need to identify baselines which are very clear to you and to your students. Data collected for the baseline will allow you to find out how well the program achieved what was intended, what parts of the program contributed most (or least) to the outcomes and what could be done differently next time.

Teachers often believe (quite correctly) that they can develop service-learning projects in isolation from community partners.  It is true that forming community partnerships can be time-consuming and it can be difficult to sustain them, however once developed, these partnerships result in better experiences for your students and better outcomes for the community.