My Service Learning Project

Service Learning
For my service learning project I dedicated one hour to selling tickets for the benefited pulled pork dinner with our Cowley Activity Awareness Team (CAAT), and did the rest of my hours by serving at the lunch/dinner. The pulled pork dinner was hosted by ACES, another club at Cowley, and it all the money that was raised went towards a food packaging event in November. My duties in this were to fill up cups with water/tea, serve food, and send out prepared meals to cars. I chose to do this as my service learning project because I wanted to be face to face with the people that were helping us make a difference, and to gain experience with serving.
There were many areas that I saw being used in this service learning event that we have been taught in psychology. We used classical conditioning which is the type of learning in which a response naturally elicited by one stimulus comes to be elicited by a different, formerly neutral, stimulus. Every time a person would walk into the room where we were serving food we would automatically start preparing our food and being ready to serve them when they got into line. We were being conditioned to serve food every time someone new entered the room. This would also be known as a conditioned response. James Frye and Tabitha Farley, the ones who helped with the event, were our reinforcers. Reinforcers are a stimuli that follows a behavior and increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. Whenever we were doing a good job, they would complement us and tell us to keep up our good work. This made us want to work harder and do better.
Observational learning was also used in this. Observational learning is learning by observing other people’s behavior. We were showed where to put prearranged food, how much to put on the plates, and how to be sanitary around the food. Short term memory is briefly storing and processing information from our sensory registers. We used our short term memory by remembering what how much food goes where, and what to tell people when they’re confused on where to go and what to get.
I’m majoring in social work and I found many things that linked this and my major together. I learned how to act in a setting with different types of people with different wants and needs.