This would flow perfectly into Kahne and Westheimer who asks the question "in service of what?"...
- Educators and legislators alike maintain that service learning can improve the community and invigorate the classroom, providing rich educational experiences for students at all levels of schooling.
- The hope was that students' values and beliefs might be transformed by these experiences.
- The ability of a service learning curriculum to foster authentic, experience-based learning opportunities, to motivate students, to help students engage in higher-order thinking in contextually varied environments, and to promote interdisciplinary studies has led some, such as John Brisco, a leader in the field, to label service learning "the Trojan horse of school reform."
- However, there are numerous ways in which a curriculum focused on giving provides opportunities tor students to develop caring relationships, especially when compared to a traditional academic curriculum.
I would like to sit here and tell you that my experience at Service Learning has be amazing and tell you a passionate story about how I have reached out and touched a child’s heart, and my own in the process, because I’m a good rural kid and I was brought up to “Change the World and leave a positive IMPACT everywhere you go”. Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I feel like my time at Service Learning has been pure charity (at best). Yes, I have learned a lot from the teachers and students alike, yes it was an experience I won’t soon forget, but more often then not I felt like a seat warmer and nothing more.
ReplyDeleteChange happens in the classroom when minds are opened and new experience brought up. Mr. Mitrelis had one of these moments when he opened the Civil Rights Movement section with “If it weren’t for the struggles of those I’m about to tell you about, you wouldn’t be sitting here in a desegregated classroom today and all of our lives would have been very different”. He went on through the class to point to things like Brown v. Board and explain how it directly effected them, with an explicitness Delpit would be proud of but an impact Kahne and Westheimer appreciate best.
I almost feel like my time was wasted at Nathanael Greene because I didn’t cause any change, but the funny thing about it is that every situation is personal experience and what a person makes of it. So even if I don’t feel like I did anything, maybe by calling students out on sexual harassment, by being slightly more direct when Mr. Mitrelis was detached, or by giving tips on how to start a paper, I did cause change in someone without knowing it. Or maybe that’s just what my upbringing wants me to believe.
I felt that during my time at The Met i was making a change and not being used as charity. the reason i say this is because i have helped to work with the school before S.S.L. project. When i was working for The Met for two summers i was a alumni students who was leading advisories for a month and training teachers at the same time. One of the teachers i trained is now a principle at one of the campuses and the other now has a senior class which is about to graduate.
ReplyDeleteI feel like i have had an impact on some of the students, being a graduate student from The Met i am able to help prepare students who are still a little bit weary about what they can really achieve at the school, since the cirriculum is so much more different than other high schools. Because they got to see what i have accomplished in my life after graduating from The Met they know that they can really accomplish good and positive things, even if The Met is a very different school.
Thoughtful reflections on how your experiences are contextualized in the K&W sense. I wish you had a little more detail in explaining the K&W framework on the initial post...
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