"This year, over ten million people will go abroad, eager to find the perfect blend of adventure and altruism. Volunteer travel can help you find your place in the world--and find out what you're made of. So why do so many international volunteer programs fail to make an impact? Why do some do more harm than good? Learning Service offers a powerful new approach that invites volunteers to learn from host communities before trying to 'help' them. It's also a thoughtful critique of the sinister side of volunteer travel; a guide for turning good intentions into effective results; and essential advice on how to make the most of your experience."--Amazon.com.
Change the World with Service Learning is clear, direct and easy to use, and was designed for busy teachers integrating Service Learning into their existing curriculum. This book guides teachers from all content areas and grade levels to create outstanding Service Learning projects with students like no other book does. Change the World with Service Learning is a no-fluff, step-by-step, teacher-to-teacher description of how to create, plan, teach, and celebrate Service Learning projects that meet and exceed local, district, and national curricular expectations.
The Complete Guide to Service Learning is the go-to resource in the fast-growing field of service learning. It is an award-winning treasury of service activities, community service project ideas, quotes, reflections, and resources that can help teachers and youth workers engage young hearts and minds in reaching out and giving back. Author and internationally known service learning expert Cathryn Berger Kaye presents service learning—its importance, steps, essential elements, and challenges—within a curricular context and organized by theme. This second edition maintains the easy-to-use format of the original and is enhanced with updated information on service learning programs and pedagogy. Benefits include: A blueprint for service learning, from getting started to assessing the experience Integration of K–12 service learning standards Inspiring quotations, background information and resources, preparation activities, real-life examples, and community service project ideas that have worked for other teachers 13 thematic chapters covering topics commonly selected for service learning projects such as animal protection and care, elders, emergency readiness, the environment, hunger and homelessness, literacy, special needs, and more Hundreds of real-life field-tested service learning projects Ideas for fortifying service learning programs by incorporating global literacy and creating a culture of service The online digital content has over 200 pages of forms and bonus materials and includes: All of the planning and tracking forms from the book, many customizable 39 sample planning templates for all service learning themes at each grade level 10 original essays written by experts in the field 22 author interviews, including interviews with authors Laurie David, Cynthia Lord, Jordan Sonnenblick, Kathe Koja, Danica Novgorodoff, Janet Tashjian, Deborah Ellis, Sonia Levitin, Ellen Senisi, and more! More than 300 additional “Bookshelf” recommendations that describe books that offer teachable moments about community service, responsibility, caring, and helping, as well as ways to encourage discussion and combine literature and service learning. Drawing on her years as a classroom teacher and international service learning consultant, trainer, speaker, and program developer, Cathryn Berger Kaye tells you everything you want and need to know about service learning. Recommended for K–12 teachers and administrators, college and university faculty, youth group leaders, government agencies and nonprofits, and after-school programs. Teachers, parents, and group leaders: Use this valuable resource in a classroom or youth-serving organization, after-school program, or as a family.
Transforming Teacher Education through Service-Learning provides a fresh look at educational reform through the lens of teacher preparation. It poses the question “Why service-learning now?” as it discusses the meaningful ways service-learning pedagogy can transform the approaches used to prepare teachers to educate tomorrow’s children. The pedagogy of service-learning has significant implications for teacher education. Its transformative aspects have far reaching potential to address teacher candidate dispositions and provide deeper understanding of diversity. Knowledge of the pedagogy and how to implement it in candidates’ future classrooms could alter education to a more powerful experience of democracy in action and enhance the civic mission of schools. The current and ongoing research found within this volume is meant to continue support of the notion of educational reform. Because the vision we hold becomes the reality we experience, it is imperative to consider the question—Why service-learning now?—as we adjust teacher preparation programs to promote engaging opportunities for today’s youth.
As academic service-learning continues to grow rapidly, practitioners are discovering a pressing need for solid empirical research about learning outcomes. Where's the Learning in Service-Learning? helps define learning expectations, presents data about learning, and links program characteristics with learning outcomes. It is the first book to explore the experience of service-learning as a valid learning activity.
This edited collection will stand as the first volume that specifically describes service-learning programs and courses designed as part of teacher education programs in the fields of literacy education, secondary English education, elementary language arts education, and related fields. The contributing authors describe the programs they have developed at their universities and/or in their local communities, providing information about the rationale for their initiative, the design of the course, the outcomes of the experience, and other matters that will help literacy educators develop similar courses and experiences of their own. Additionally, this edited collection will fill a great gap in the field’s knowledge of alternative forms of teacher education. It will provide descriptions of service-learning initiatives that have been field-tested with demonstrable results. Thus far the field has produced widely scattered articles in journals covering a variety of disciplines, but no definitive collection of papers in which service-learning designed to promote literacy instruction is housed in a single volume edited for cross-referencing and thematic categorization. The two editors have developed courses and received grants to support service-learning initiatives at their universities and believe that others might develop similar programs if they had better understandings of their value and design. Their intention with this volume is to promote service-learning more broadly among literacy educators.
Transformative Critical Service-Learning offers hands-on tools for implementing, reflecting on, and assessing critical service-learning in classrooms and community spaces. Answering a need from practitioners for a practical tool for making sense of critical service-learning, the authors introduce the Critical Service-Learning Implementation Model as a way to encourage conversations among stakeholders. Materials include specific criteria to examine, examples of application and context, and ways to incorporate the model into reflective practices. Valuing partnerships, reflection, and analysis of power dynamics, the research and strategies offered here provide an entry point for faculty new to critical service-learning, while also offering new ideas and tools for long-time practitioners. Chapters offer particular attention to strategies for engaging students, syllabus development, and reflective cycles. Additionally, the authors offer a model for faculty development in the area of critical service-learning at the institutional level, including suggestions for faculty and administrators interested in increasing engagement with social justice and community spaces. As institutions of higher education are focusing more on the ways in which they can meet the needs of the communities surrounding their campuses, The Carnegie Foundation's Elective Classification for Community Engagement provides a special-purpose designation for higher education institutions with commitments in the area of community engagement. Universities must commit to institutional change in order to improve the outcomes for the communities surrounding the campus. The classification framework represents best practices in the field and encourages continuous improvement through periodic re-classification. Service-learning has been identified as one of the more effective methods for engaging undergraduate and graduate students in community engaged scholarship, which facilitates development of critical inquiry, understanding needs assessment, and deep reflection on inequality. The authors intend this book to benefit university faculty endeavoring to begin or develop service-learning courses, higher education administrators who want to train and engage university faculty in adopting a more community engaged teaching model, and P-12 teachers, who often serve as community partners with higher education institutions to facilitate justice-oriented approaches to teaching their diverse students. Perfect for courses such as:Critical Thinking and Communication/Service-Learning │ Service-Learning Capstone │ Pathways to Effective Community Engagement │ School and Community Collaboration │ Teaching to Transform Society │ Food, Environment, and Sustainability │ Race and the Right to Vote in the US │ Education and Society │ Environmental Education │ Race, Place, and Memory
Service learning can help students develop a sense of civic responsibility and commitment, often while addressing pressing community needs. One goal of literary studies is to understand the ethical dimensions of the world, and thus service learning, by broadening the environments students consider, is well suited to the literature classroom. Whether through a public literacy project that demonstrates the relevance of literary study or community-based research that brings literary theory to life, student collaboration with community partners brings social awareness to the study of literary texts and helps students and teachers engage literature in new ways. In their introduction, the volume editors trace the history of service learning in the United States, including the debate about literature's role, and outline the best practices of the pedagogy. The essays that follow cover American, English, and world literature; creative nonfiction and memoir; literature-based writing; and cross-disciplinary studies. Contributors describe a wide variety of service-learning projects, including a course on the Harlem Renaissance in which students lead a community writing workshop, an English capstone seminar in which seniors design programs for public libraries, and a creative nonfiction course in which first-year students work with elderly community members to craft life narratives. The volume closes with a list of resources for practitioners and researchers in the field.
This substantially expanded new edition of this widely-used and acclaimed text maintains the objectives and tenets of the first. It is designed to help students understand and reflect on their community service experiences both as individuals and as citizens of communities in need of their compassionate expertise. It is designed to assist faculty in facilitating student development of compassionate expertise through the context of service in applying disciplinary knowledge to community issues and challenges. In sum, the book is about how to make academic sense of civic service in preparing for roles as future citizen leaders. Each chapter has been developed to be read and reviewed, in sequence, over the term of a service-learning course. Students in a semester course might read just one chapter each week, while those in a quarter-term course might need to read one to two chapters per week. The chapters are intentionally short, averaging 8 to 14 pages, so they do not interfere with other course content reading. This edition presents four new chapters on Mentoring, Leadership, Becoming a Change Agent, and Short-Term Immersive and Global Service-Learning experiences. The authors have also revised the original chapters to more fully address issues of social justice, privilege/power, diversity, intercultural communication, and technology; have added more disciplinary examples; incorporated additional academic content for understanding service-learning issues (e.g., attribution theory); and cover issues related to students with disabilities, and international students. This text is a student-friendly, self-directed guide to service-learning that: Develops the skills needed to succeed Clearly links service-learning to the learning goals of the course Combines self-study and peer-study workbook formats with activities that can be incorporated in class, to give teachers maximum flexibility in structuring their service-learning courses Promotes independent and collaborative learning Equally suitable for courses of a few weeks’ or a few months’ duration Shows students how to assess progress and communicate end-results Written for students participating in service learning as a class, but also suitable for students working individually on a project. Instructor's Manual This Instructor Manual discusses the following six key areas for aligning your course with use of Learning through Serving, whether you teach a senior-level high school class, freshman studies course, or a college capstone class: 1. Course and syllabus design 2. Community-partner collaboration 3. Creating class community 4. Strategic teaching techniques 5. Developing intercultural competence 6. Impact assessment
Interest in and research on civic engagement and service-learning have increased exponentially. In this rapid growth, efforts have been made to institutionalize pedagogies of engagement across both K-12 and higher education. As a result, increased positive attention has been complemented equally by well-founded critiques complicating experiential approaches’ claims and questioning if institutional, financial, and philosophical commitment is warranted. A key complaint from these critical voices is the tightly woven, protective insular core in the field of service-learning. This claim is not unfounded, nor necessarily bad. Initial efforts to legitimize service-learning and other forms of community-based education required group cohesion. The concern, however, is that the initial group cohesion has led to groupthink wherein group members have avoided critical analysis and evaluation. This book aims to prevent groupthink within the field of service-learning by allowing for the examination of effective alternatives by new voices who can serve as “critical evaluators” from within the field itself. Myriad perspectives are offered, including empirical, theoretical, practical, and community perspectives. Authors challenge preconceived notions of service-learning, who is benefited by this pedagogy, outcomes of participation and implementation, and most importantly the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological lenses through which service-learning is even considered. The book allows servicelearning’s major criticisms to be examined, challenges to be voiced, and research agendas to be laid. This book parallels service-learning’s presence and popularity across various disciplines/fields. Chapters are written from broad perspectives and are aimed to inform service-learning researchers and educators, community organizations, and policy makers who consider service-learning as a means to address civic responsibility. Authors expose theoretical and philosophical concerns circulating in the field, and often still occupying spaces on the fringe of discourse, action, and research. The book raises fundamental questions for undergraduate and graduate courses with social justice themes by considering the implications that pedagogies of engagement have on learners and communities.
