Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Developmental Perspective On Community Service In Adolescence, Miranda Yates, James Youniss

School K-12

A substantial number of U.S. adolescents currently participate in community service and there is increased national interest in service programs. This article assesses the assumption of developmental benefits to service participants by critically reviewing 44 empirical studies. It offers a theoretical framework for understanding the findings by connecting them to identity development and delineating three pertinent concepts: agency, social relatedness, and moral-political awareness. These concepts are applied to studies that investigate: ( 1) the characteristics and motivations of participants, ( 2) the effects of service, and ( 3) the process of service. The findings support the conclusion that service activities …

Defining Excellence For School-Linked Services, Esther Wattenberg, Yvonne Pearson

School K-12

For more than a decade there has been great interest in educational circles about school-linked services ways by which children can receive the full range of social services they need to enter their classrooms ready to learn and parents can get the help they need to support their children's development. This publication presents summaries of the proceedings from a day-long conference on school-linked services. The following presentations are summarized:(1) "Welcoming Remarks" (Esther Wattenberg) ;(2) "Anchoring School-Linked Services in Sobering Realities: A Glance at the Past and a Searching Stare at the Present" (Paula Allen Meares);(3)"Response from School Social Workers: A …

A Service-Learning Contract: Clarity, Commitment, And Completion, Darroll Bussler

Special Topics, General

A student was reporting her service-learning experience to her classmates during a reflection session. She was hesitant to begin ... and then explained \Vhy. Everyone in the class seemed to be having fun and fulfillment in their experiences. She said, "My experience isn't fun. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing; I don't even think they know I'm there, and I don't think I want to finish my service." She then said, "I think we need something like ... a learning contract."

Community-Based Learning Projects For The "Real World", Chris Davis

Special Topics, General

As we walked down the street to the next-door elementary school, the I 5 high school juniors with me began reflecting on their elementary school experiences. They remembered the Dr. Seuss stories their teachers had read to them, the art projects, the time to play, the time to just be kids. Life was simpler and more fun then, they all agreed.

Now school mostly means sitting at desks and listening to teachers talk for a large portion of the day. And when teachers aren't talking to them, they take tests, read a textbook chapter, write on a ditto, watch a …

Service Learning: Meeting Student And Community Needs, Denise I. Yoder, Esther Retish, Rahima Wade

Special Topics, General

This article describes a program through which students with learning disabilities and culturally diverse backgrounds, and their peers in the general education program, demonstrated their abilities to be service providers to many people within their community.

Service Learning: Developing A Curriculum For Caring, Sally R. Beisser

Service Learning, General

This article defines service learning and provides summary data on a federal grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service to implement service learning in the classroom. The author identifies and describes four categories of successful service projects and provides examples of integrating the curriculum content to identify and meet community and school-based needs. She then suggests instructional strategies and follow-up resources for professional use.

Community-Based Learning: A Foundation For Meaningful Educational Reform, Thomas R. Owens, Changhua Wang

Service Learning, General

Many of today's leaders in education, business, and community development are coming to realize, even more than in the past, that schools alone cannot prepare our youth for productive adulthood. These leaders are ready to try new approaches that link learning activities in classrooms with a full range of learning experiences available in our communities.

Service-Learning: A Balanced Approach To Experiential Education, Andrew Furco

Service Learning, General

For over a quarter of a century, education researchers and practitioners have struggled to determine how to best characterize service-learning. In 1979, Robert Sigmon defined service-learning as an experiential education approach that is premised on "reciprocal learning" (Sigmon, 1979). He suggested that because learning flows from service activities, both those who provide service and those who receive it "learn" from the experience. In Sigmon's view, service-learning occurs only when both the providers and recipients of service benefit from the activities.

Is Service-Learning Really Better Than Community Service? A Study Of High School Service Program Outcomes, Andrew Furco

Service Learning, General

In their 1981 study, the Experiential Education Evaluation Project, Dan Conrad and Diane Hedin investigated the impact of a range of experiential education programs on secondary school students. The study, which involved more than 1000 secondary school students, compared the effects of five different types of experiential education programs-community service, internships, political action, community study, and adventure education on students' psychological, social, and intellectual development. The study found that the various programmatic forms of experiential education showed significant, positive effects in all three student outcome areas. It also revealed that certain programmatic features, such as clearly articulated program goals and …

Service-Learning And School-To-Work: Making The Connections, Andrew Furco

Service Learning, General

Recently, much attention has been focused on two federal initiatives that encourage students to explore learning opportunities outside the classroom. The National and Community Service Trust Act and the School to Work Opportunities Act provide states with assistance to develop and implement school programs in which elementary, secondary, and post-secondary students are engaged in learning experiences that are hands-on, meaningful, and connected to the real world. Although the acts differ on their intended educational purposes, both are based on similar educational philosophies, principles, and pedagogies. These fundamental similarities suggest that the two reforms can work synergistically to establish powerful and …

Downtown As A Classroom: Social/Architechtural History Of Beaufort, Lady's Island Middle School

Project Summaries

We live in a town rich in history and architecture, yet nowhere in the 12-year curriculum are these subjects taught. The students and staff of Lady's Island Middle are working to rectify this omission. The purpose of "Downtown As A Classroom" is to discover (via oral histories and written records), write, illustrate and publish a top-quality children's account of folklore and fact based on Beaufort's architectural past and present.

The basic premise is that every building tells a story. It is these family stories which 150+ eighth graders, representing the full spectrum of student population, will learn and preserve. By …

Service Learning Teacher Training Manual, Scott Richardson

Guides

This is a guide for trainers who view service learning as a teaching strategy to improve instruction. The guide assumes that the participants in the training are teachers who will use service learning to help their students achieve the objectives of the school curriculum. Some of the training sessions, such as reflection and defining service learning, may be useful for non-school-based programs as well. The bulk of the guide, however, is shaped by our belief that service learning is good education. We view service learning as an experiential teaching strategy with an ultimate aim of promoting student understanding of established …

Community Partner Orientation For Service Learning Courses, Service Learning Institute

Guides

We have prepared this manual as a "work in progress" to help you think about the service learning process and practice. We are at a crucial stage in developing service learning infrastructure. We began our work this fall semester supporting 7 courses which involved 160 students in over 30 agency/sites in the Salinas-Seaside-Monterey area. This spring, 24 service learning courses/experiences are being offered as more faculty become involved with extending learning experiences into the community.

We offer you this manual to assist you and inform you of our plans for supporting, monitoring, and evaluating service learning experiences this spring. We …

Guides To Developing Service-Learning Programs, Gail Klosterman

Guides

This document lists those guides in our collection which are most pertinent to service-learning. Each citation provides bibliographic information, an indication of the type of guide, a program grade level, and the source or sources where the guide can be obtained. If an abstract was available from the ERIC database or the author it is included. The next edition of this document will include a greater number of abstracts as our staff continues to abstract and index materials. The guides included in this document meet the following criteria:

1. NSLCC has a copy of the resource on hand for reference by …

Developing Reflective Learners: Serendipity And Synergy At Wheaton College, Hannah Goldberg, Daniel Golden, Victoria Mcgillin

Evaluation/Reflection

For the past decade, Wheaton College, a small liberal arts institution located in Norton, Massachusetts, has been creating, refining, and integrating a range of initiatives designed to develop students into active and reflective learners. Some of these initiatives grew out of explicit institutional commitments to teaching and learning innovation, while others were in fact happy accidents of circumstance, or situations where an individual interesting program idea took hold, spread into other units of the College, and was itself transformed in the process.

Evaluating Service-Learning Programs, Andrew Furco

Evaluation/Reflection

What we know about service-learning programs regarding impacts on students, communities, institutions:
• little systematic data analysis has been done;
• most existing findings are anecdotal;
• findings that exist are narrow in scope and are typically nongeneralizeable to other programs;
• most studies on service-learning have focused on the impact of service on student (service provider) development;
• there are a growing number of service-learning evaluations that are assessing the impacts of service on communities (service recipients);
• assessments of the impacts of service-learning on institutions are negligible
• regarding impacts on students, we know that service can impact …

Measuring Program Outcomes: A Practical Approach, United Way Of America

Evaluation/Reflection

If yours is like most human service agencies or youth- and family-serving organizations, you regularly report on how much money you receive, how many staff and volunteers you have, and what they do in your programs. You know how many individuals participate in your programs, how many hours you spend serving them, and how many brochures or classes or counseling sessions you produce. In other words, you document program inputs, activities, and outputs.

Community Service To The Elderly A Service-Learning Model: Guidelines For Replication, James M. Mccrea, Sherry G. Cottom

Curriculum

At the University of Pittsburgh, Generations Together, an Intergenerational Studies Program develops programs that bring young and old together in ways that benefit both generations. The University Challenge for Excellence Program (DCEP) works with entering students who are often first generation, mostly African-American, and who may be in need of special assistance during their first year. UCEP seeks ways to raise their self esteem, give them a sense of purpose, connect them to the University, and ultimately to retain them at Pitt through graduation. In 1994, these two university programs joined together with the Housing Authority of the City of …

Animal Tracks Water Action Pack, Karen Romano Young, Charles Wilkinson

Curriculum

This guide contains: Discovery, Awareness, Action and Appendices.

Community Service Leadership Conference, Bill Sigismond, Gary Thompson

Curriculum

Materials from the Community Service Leadership Conference, Saturday, February 3, 1996.

Ethics And Sovereignty, William L. Blizek, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the political arena, every nation is considered to be sovereign. That is, what happens within the legitimate borders of a nation, what docs not affect other nations, is to be decided by the people of that nation or the government of' that nation and no one else. If a nation wants to centralize economic decisions, that is its business. If a nation wants a free market economy, no other nation can interfere. If a nation wants to be represented by a new form of government, it has the right to change governments. And so on.

Outside or the political …

Adults As Allies, Barry Checkoway

Partnerships/Community

Young people are creating community change! They are tutoring in the schools, working in health clinics, and serving meals in soup kitchens. They are cleaning up the environment, rehabilitating houses for the homeless, and formulating strategies for neighborhood revitalization. They are solving problems, planning programs, and involving people in decisions at the community level.

Crossing Boundaries A Research Agenda Toward Productive Learning And Community Renewal, American Association For Higher Education

Higher Education

Colleges and universities expect that society's pursuit of democratic goals is continuously informed by well-prepared graduates who shape and contribute to the common good. The creative, competent, and committed student is often a faculty's finest form of service. Joining this fundamental mission to the daily tasks of continually building and renewing democracy was the focus of the 12th annual AAHE Research Forum. Crossing boundaries among teaching, research, and service includes making informed commitments and taking responsible actions. But what do we need to know to reconsider who we are and what we do in light of the changing complexities of …

Leam & Serve Higher Education Programs In Minnesota: The Impact And Sustainability Of Service-Learning, Kevin J. Gormley

Higher Education

This article provides a descriptive evaluation of 12 higher education, service-learning programs in Minnesota funded in part by the Corporation for National Service: Learn and Serve America Program.' The research for this project was conducted in 45 days during the summer of 1995 using a phenomenological methodology to examine the impact and sustainability of the programs. The data for this research were derived from interviews with individuals involved in local initiatives. Three main categories of information became evident after analyzing the data: (I) program design, (2) success and impact of programs, and (3) sustainability and the future of service-learning. These …

Student Experiences With Service Learning In A Business Ethics Course, John Kohls

Higher Education

Service learning provides many challenges and opportunities for the instructor who wishes to test its potential. This paper looks at some of the promise for service learning in the undergraduate Business Ethics course and describes one experience with this project. Quotations from student journals and reflective papers are utilized to present the student's perspective on the project. Some suggestions are offered for insuring effective service learning in courses like Business Ethics.

Sociology And Service Learning At Loyola, Barbara H. Vann

Higher Education

Service learning is a term used to describe efforts to link community service to the academic curriculum. It is a broad, nebulously defined term which at times includes academic endeavors.such as internships, needs assessments and participatory action research (Marullo, !996). A more narrow .usage, and the usage promoted by its advocates, refers to the process through which students participate in organized service activity for academic credit to meet identified community needs and reflect on that service to further their understanding of course material (Bringle and Hatcher, 1994 ). And, as Marullo (1996) has pointed out, when service learning activity is …

Opportunity For All: Linking Service-Learning And Business Education, Edward Zlotkowski

Higher Education

A major criticism of contemporary business education centers on its failure to help business students achieve sufficient educational breath, particularly with regard to the external environment of business. The service-learning movement offers business faculty an excellent opportunity to address this deficiency. By developing curricular projects linked to community needs, faculty can further their students' technical skills while helping them simultaneously develop greater inter-personal, inter-cultural, and ethical sensitivity.

Large-Scale Institutional Change To Implement An Urban University Mission: Portland State University, Judith A. Ramaley

Higher Education

In response to calls for accountability and effectiveness, public universities are reviewing their missions and are adopting measurable mission-specific goals. An emerging distinctive institutional type is the urban university, an institution characterized by the nature and extent of its responsiveness to the research and educational needs of complex metropolitan regions. This paper concerns the national environment for organizational change, a model for change, and a case study of one urban university that has pursued comprehensive and systemic change in its academic and administrative environment to direct resources to the support of its distinctive urban mission.

Implementing Service Learning In Higher Education, Robert G. Bringle, Julie A. Hatcher

Higher Education

The current interest in service learning provides universities with a unique opportunity to engage their students in community service, expand their educational agenda, and build reciprocal partnerships - with the community. This article discusses the implementation of service learning by delineating a set of activities for four constituencies: the institution, faculty, students, and community.

Experiential Education And Civic Learning, Robert H. Mckenzie

Civic Engagement

The nature of civic learning not only demands experiential education; civic learning reinforces for us the nature of experiential education. To explore the relationship between the two, we must understand a number of factors: the nature of the contemporary challenges to civic learning; the relationship of the purposes that educational institutions choose to that civic challenge; the pedagogical choices available for learning civically; and the relationship of learning theory to the centrality of choice that lies at the core of civic learning. At the end of this investigation, we will find some important guiding principles that civic learning suggests for …