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Service learning is the name for forcing college students to do volunteer work as part of their college careers. The hope is that this volunteer work will give students a better sense of civic duty, and thus, be a worthy addition to college curriculums. However, this idea relies on the faulty premise that if one is forced to volunteer that one will derive the same benefits as someone who does it out of their own desire to help. Mandatory service learning will not have the desired effect, and should not be forced upon students.
It is perhaps intuitive to think that by making students help others there will be a net positive; there could be no downside to volunteering time and effort to help the community. However, a more detailed inspection reveals there are many negatives, and any positive effects are just wishful thinking.
To begin with, service learning wouldn’t benefit the students’ education. Indeed, many students would be unable to volunteer in their field. This negates any argument that service learning would help the students’ education. While there may be specific cases where a student with a practical major could benefit from volunteering their efforts, this would simply be a positive indirect effect. Not only that, but in many cases such students are already effectively volunteering their time in the form of unpaid internships. If schools wish students to volunteer in such a manner they should be working with charities to establish more voluntary internships. However, as soon as students are forced to volunteer for the sake of volunteering, it no is longer about helping the student.
One has to ask: why it is exclusively schools that would take up this forced volunteer work? If it was really a needed benefit to s...
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...he community. The only justification for having the students do the work themselves is a sense of civic duty. Unfortunately, by forcing the students to do the work, any positive sense of civic duty will be offset by negative emotions from being forced. A better way to gain the desired sense of civic duty is through additional education that addresses the problems and their causes. In the end, the idea of mandatory service learning doesn’t make sense.
Works Cited:
Bringle, Robet G. and Julie A. Hatcher. “Implementing Service Learning in Higher Educations” (Excerpt). Journal of Higher Education 67.2 (1996): 221-223. Print.
Caret, Robert L. “Local Students Serve as They Learn.” Examiner.com. The Examiner. 20 September 2007. Web. 9 Sept. 2008.
Egger, John B. “service 'Learning' Reduced Learning.” Examiner.com. The Examiner, 2 October 2007. Web. 9 Sept. 2008.
If students want to learn more about their field, they should feel inclined to actually do the work on their own. Also, if a school makes each student complete at least 24 hours of community service to graduate, every student in the school will graduate with the exact same amount, which means hundreds of students are going to the workforce with no advantage over the other.
If schools wanted to encourage community service then they shouldn’t force students to do it. Schools should let students know about volunteering opportunities and possibly let them sign up for the school so that it is easier for them to do so if they want
Eyler and Giles (1999) suggest that there is significance in the hyphen between service and learning and that is where the definition...
Strage, A. (2004, June). Long-term academic benefits of service-learning: When and where do they manifest themselves? College Student Journal, 38(2), 257-261.
provide service to disadvantaged groups or public areas. While community service has numerous benefits, it only focuses on unidimensional service and caters to a current need setting nothing in place to implement substantial change in the future. In contrast, service learning focuses on reciprocity and sets a foundation to create changes in communities. Service learning is defined as an organized collaborative process that requires individuals to actively participate in service projects. Community service is often viewed as volunteerism rather than service learning. Individuals often times tend to establish barriers between the provider and the person receiving help and never focusing on gaining anything from the group or person being assisted.
How did a departmental faculty generated 12,000 hours of student community service in one semester? The following is a qualitative analysis of conversations with faculty members in a department that recently instituted a service learning requirement for all student majors. The campus is a large urban comprehensive university with a multi-ethnic student body. Approximately fifteen faculty members were interviewed for this study. While most of those interviewed included service learning components in their courses, interviews with faculty members who resisted or refused to incorporate service learning were conducted as well in order to understand varying faculty attitudes towards service learning.
A service learning experience is designed to enhance a student 's growth in personal and social development and to obtain an understanding of community involvement. For my service learning experience, I volunteered at Change Point Center. In this reflection paper, I will discuss in depth information about the services that Change Point provides, my goals while I was there,and what I ultimately learned from this experience.
I assumed that service learning could only be done from serving people facing poverty through reflections. However, this article taught me that simply teaching other people can classify as a potentially rewarding service learning experience. My grandpa, who is seventy-eight years old, often struggles with using technology such as phones or computers. Eager to learn, he often asks for me to come over and guide him step-by-step on how to use various technologies. Many times, I will spend at least an hour explaining how to use the internet and e-mail. Although he never is able to understand how to use technology at first, over the course of time he has started to grasp the concepts. Today, he even has a smart phone and is able to communicate with me from home. The struggles my grandpa faced with technology really opened my eyes to the problems that many of the elderly encounter with advances in technology. In a world overrun by technology, I believe that more services are needed to allow everyone an educational background of how to understand
Service Learning and Social Responsibility In week three, I have to admit, am highly overwhelmed, not to mention, tackling family life, personal challenges, and a high school educational role. Notably, I am in love with teaching the youth to strive for educational accomplishments, especially, in the role of human life. Not only, am I learning my role in a high school setting but learning the value of service learning. In particular, the two learner objectives I learned this week are service learning and social responsibility.
According to Kendall (1990), scholarly literature recognizes over one hundred different definitions, with hundreds more being added in the two decades since. One of the most widely accepted definitions is that service-learning is a form of “experiential learning in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote student learning” (Jacoby, 1996, p. 5). Another useful definition of service learning from an educational pedagogy standpoint is, “learning to promote increased understanding of course content while helping students develop knowledge, skills, and cognitive capacities to deal effectively with complex social issues and problems” (Hurd, 2006, p. 1). Service learning must be curricular in nature, or credit bearing, in which students participate in a service activity that meets an identified community need and reflect on that activity in such a way to help gain further understanding of the course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility (Bringle & Hatcher,
Service learning is a method of “knowing and doing”. In my experience, it’s the one of the best way to learn the material as well reflect what we learn by helping the community. For me even more than doing it for the grades, I like to serve other people whole heartedly. The feeling of fulfillment after you serve is beyond ourselves when we extended our arm for the people in the community.
Service learning, to me, is not much different from the community service I typically involve myself in. My community service is typically a combination of mentoring and assistant coaching for high school athletic teams because when I graduate I want to go to Law school and specialize in Sports law and agency. I worked for BYRC, and there I was still in the role of a mentor because many students asked me for advice and talked to me about personal issues, but I was also in to position of a tutor. Teaching is one of my strong point, when I know the material, however I was asked to tutor students in math, science, and English. This is where my challenge was; I had to quickly reteach myself the math or science lesson that the students needed help
Higher education institutions implement, support, and maintain service learning as it fosters civic and social responsibility, develops empathy and multicultural understanding, and maintains traditional academic goals of critical thinking (Butin, 2006; Kezar & Rhoads, 2001). Often these components are part of the institution’s mission statement which provides an array of hands-on learning opportunities. Service learning is an example of an instructional method that supports hands-on learning.
Service to other is helping others solving their needs and wanting nothing in return. There’s many ways someone can serve others, it can be from helping and elder clean their backyard to major projects like running activities to raise money for different causes. My role in service learning hasn’t been a lot. I have done a few fundraisers for my school to pay for the activities they have planned for us (the students) following orders from others.
Raising community awareness to students will teach them the importance of being involved in the community. Students being able to give back to the community will prepare them for their journey to being a positive role model or servant leader.