"In Service of What"

(Connections to two previous readings)

After reading this article it gave me a different perspective on service learning. I knew this before but I never thought to compare doing service with elderly and helping out in my community to my service learning at Charlotte Woods Elementary School. I thought it was interesting when I read about Mr. Johnson’s class, “Mr. Johnson explained, students would interact with those less fortunate that themselves and would experience the excitement and joy of learning while using the community as a classroom.” This is very interesting because the students acted as good sammartian’s. I compared this to the article we read titled “Safe spaces.” It said in that article “still, classroom spaces leave their mark on all of us.” In Mr. Johnsons class his students will always have a memory of doing a good deed together by working with the less fortunate as their service learning. It also said in the article “Safe Spaces,”  “students will be more likely to develop perspectives that result in respectful behaviors.” Students working on service learning projects like in Mr. Johnsons classroom or even in Ms. Adams will become more respectful individuals. Ms. Adams seventh grade class took a different approach than Mr. Johnsons class. Her class worked together to identify issues of common concern and then voted to focus their energy on the issue of homelessness. “The class invited speakers from homeless advocacy groups, created files of newspaper articles on homelessness and read, among other items, No Place to Be: Voices of Homeless Children.”

In both cases these students are becoming an individual who develops a sense of kindness and humanitarianism at a young age. 

Another article that we read in the past connects a lot with this article. Jonathan Kozol article about “Amazing Grace” talks about a poor town in New York. In this article it talked about music middle school students met with students in a nearby poor elementary school. The children who went to this school reported that “it changed their beliefs about children from this neighborhood.” In Kozol’s article he met with a seven-year-old boy name Cliffie. Cliffe showed him around his town which is known to be poor and violent. Kozol explains how there are children in these towns who are the “poorest, most abandoned places who, despite the miseries and poisons that the world has pumped into their lives, seem, when you first meet them, to be cheerful anyway.” I compared this to the students who went to the elementary school for their service learning, they learned that these kids and the town isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. There are a lot of harmless kids and adults living there and attending school there.

In conclusion I liked this reading. I liked how they talked about service learning from a different perspective than just us working in our classrooms for an hour and a half every week.

Here is also a link to the University of Michigan and how they think Service Learning benefits!

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.black/benefits_of_participation_in_service