By the time I reached my last three semesters in my undergraduate work, about 90% of my classes contained a service learning component. I came to despise service learning until I had my senior seminar. The title of the seminar was "The Problem of Evil." Sound tempting doesn't it (pun intended). For our paper what we had to do was find a problem within society and present a solution. The catch was that our service learning had to encompass either the problem or the solution. For instance, I chose to examine needle exchange programs. I worked with a needle exchange program, since there were about thirty within a 30 miles radius, for the durations of about 5 two hours visits. We were exposed first hand to the problem and how to confront it. Other people worked in domestic violence shelters, a cancer ward, and even an arboretum (he was troubled with deforestation). By the end, we walked away with a more complete and comprehensive view of not only our problem, but the world.
Now, how does this connect back to classes here, specifically 5060 and our CI and DI positions? I actually have a proposition. To incorporate service learning into 5060 seminar, what we could do would be to have class on Tuesday (or whatever day would work) and the other day would be spent with an instructor in the classroom. It would be similar to the master teacher idea, but a bit different. You would stay with the same instructor for the duration of the semester and observe, teach, help, or whatever you worked out with your instructor. There would be guidelines, such as you had to teach some many lessons or plan out lesson plans for the instructor. This would give everyone hands on experience without disrupting the CI/DI distinction. Just a thought.
2 comments:
I know how you felt about service learning. Sometimes it can be an eye-opening experience, but other times it can be a complete waste of time. I took an undergraduate course at Tech last year that was entirely focused on service learning. We had to complete a big project for another Tech department. I won't say who the prof was or the title of the class for propriety's sake, but it was awful! Only about 5 students every got to learn anything in that class and the rest of us just did busy work that had nothing to do with the topic of the course!
I think service learning can be a valuable experience, but I think that the learning should always come before the service.
Rachel, I like your idea for splitting 5060 into a full class and then a student teaching kind of arrangement, provided we could find ways to ensure that the student teacher was helpful and not just another mouth to feed for the instructor of record. You might explore this idea further in your final exam.
But I do agree that we have to be careful with service learning not to burden the host agency or leave students without a meaningful experience (the kimd of thing Bryony refers to).
Post a Comment