Service Learning:
The What and the How

By Anika Knox, Project Leader

Service-learning has become a hot topic in Connecticut this past year, and SEE’s Building Ethical Communities Through Service-Learning (BEC) program has been a key program in helping schools and teachers learn more about this wonderful teaching method. Districts such as Hartford Public Schools now require 60 hours of service for graduation. Schools from across Connecticut are also adding a service-learning component to their academic requirements. Service-learning can become a magical learning experience that can spark a light in the eyes of even the most reluctant students. Service-learning has the ability, when done correctly, to enliven classrooms, expand communities, and make teaching and learning fun--and we all need a little more fun.

Two common questions from teachers and administrators are "What exactly is service-learning?" and "How do I do it with everything else that I have to do?" Service-learning is a way of teaching that connects a service project directly to classroom activities. It is different from community service in that there is a direct link to teaching objectives and learning. Teachers and/or students involved with service-learning find a need in the community, connect that need with an academic objective, and plan activities to address the need. Teachers teach what they need to teach; they just teach through a service project.

This year a technology teacher had his students create birdhouses. His students have always taken the finished products home. As part of a service initiative, the class donated the birdhouses to the local nature center. The students contacted the center to find out what kind of birdhouses they needed, made the houses, and then took a field trip to help put up the houses on trees. They wrote about their project in journals. The students met the necessary technology objective while seeing their work go toward a good cause.

There are many types of service projects. They fall into at least one of the four categories: education, human needs, environment, and public safety. Most teachers are able to look through their curriculum and find goals, lessons, or materials that connect to service projects and that fit into one of these categories.

A service-learning project can serve many different communities. A community does not have to be your town. A community can be your classroom, your school, your neighborhood, the world, or a group of people like senior citizens, patients in a hospital, or young mothers. Ask yourself if there are needs in these communities that connect with any of the four service categories and your curriculum. For example, working together, math and social studies teachers in a middle school have created a human needs project to benefit newborn babies. Their students make quilts representing different aspects of American life in the 1800’s. The quilts are then donated to infants in need at the hospital. The students are using the social studies skills they are taught during the year and combining them with math skills of geometry and measurement to meet a need in their community. They are truly learning to serve and serving to learn.

There are hundreds of other project ideas that connect to academic goals. For a link to some of these ideas, you may visit the BEC Web site at www.ethicsed.org. This is your opportunity to do something amazing and to show your students that they have the power to help, to change, and to make a difference in their lives and the lives of others.

If you would like more information about service-learning, want to schedule a training session for staff, school, or youth organization, or would like to apply to be part of the Building Ethical Communities Through Service-Learning program (it’s free!), please call Anika Knox at (203) 783-4441.