Importance Of Service Learning In The Classroom

Before deciding where I wanted to do my service learning, I knew I wanted to do something that had some relevance to my degree that I will be receiving in healthcare management. I was eager to gain more experience and become more knowledgeable of how an organization operates as it relates to healthcare management. I was able to secure an opportunity to volunteer at the Dallas Veterans Affairs (VA) Hospital. After completing the required VA forms, I got partnered with Mr. Alonzo Price Jr. who is a Management Analyst in Ambulatory Care, which is the department that oversees the Primary Care Providers.

In the assigned article entitled “Why Service Learning” by Bruce W. Speck, it provides great insight as to why we need to engage in service learning. This article focused on the questions that were like the reasoning behind service learning and how does it benefit the student. One definition in the article that stood out to me was service learning being defined as a pedagogy that fosters the development of skills and knowledge needed for participation in public life. This was prevalent because it allows the student to network with others outside of the community while giving back. Service learning was created to get away from the traditional way of learning while implementing a new learning system.

I found Kathleen Cahill’s presentation on service learning to be very interesting. I have always been aware of how important it is to do service for your community. In high school, I had to complete 100 hours of service over the four-year span. This increased my awareness of the importance of service, and showed me a variety of organizations the exist in Erie, PA. However, I was never aware of the high level of poverty that exists in Erie until I saw Kathleen Cahill’s presentation. I was shocked to learn that the number of those living in poverty in the City of Erie, is around 30%. This statistic made me realize even more the importance of service, especially in the Erie community.

Assistant Professor of Education, Dan Butin, asserts in his essay " Service- Learning is Dangerous" that service-learning is dangerous because it forces the focus of education outside of the classroom and challenges pre-existing notions of what higher education entails and how it is structured. He suggests that it should be more than just a course, but should be the course itself. He also contends that service-learning is able to provoke the student to question who they are and what they believe. It is able to combine conventional education with life experience for a more rounded approach to educating.

For the Service Learning Assignment, I decided to volunteer at Northwind Rehabilitation and Health Care Center. My current interest is working in the medical field that deals with babies. The service learning placement that best fit my schedule was Northwind Rehabilitation and Health Care Center. This organization works with mostly senior citizens that need special care at all times. There were times where individuals that were not senior citizens that came there because it is not strictly a nursing home. The residents are not able to care for themselves and need constant supervision to ensure their safety. Some of the resident may require physical therapy. My responsibilities was to interact with the different residents on each visit and complete

Before commencing service learning, I had a number of misconceptions towards people with disabilities. Before volunteering, I had a lack of understanding, viewing people with disabilities as dependent and in need of constant help. Another misconception towards people with disabilities was focusing on the person’s lack of ability rather than the individual which consequently resulted in a one-dimensional outlook towards people with disabilities. Reflecting upon these views, I am appalled with these naive and prejudice

I participated in service learning at Fraser school in Richfield. Starting in September I helped out in a toddler age classroom every Thursday. Fraser school is a preschool setting for infants and toddlers. Besides getting the children kindergarten ready and offering a somewhat typical day of daycare/school, Fraser offers occupational, physical, and speech therapy. Some of the children have disabilities and some do not, Fraser is not discriminatory and they provide care for anyone. Some of the things I did in the classroom were prepare snack and lunch for the children, play games, participate in art projects, music, and reading, and play games with the children. The two teachers really appreciated my help, as I was provided an extra hand for them while they prepared daily activities. Playtime was usually hectic for the group and it needed to be closely monitored. I was also able to keep the children safe and keep a close eye on the total of twelve toddlers during playtime. My experiences at Fraser helped me understand many topics we talked about in our Intro to Sociology class. A few topics that stood out to me the most were the idea of social integration and many of the functions of the education system, the three stages in the development of self, institutional discrimination with minority and group divisions.

Service Learning is an educational strategy set in place to enlighten students with instruction and experience, in addition to improve learning , teach responsibility, and support the community. Service learning is vital to the development of the student, given that it intertwines academic and personal development together. It is aimed to enhance a student’s learning in all aspects of life.

The purpose of this service-learning project was to educate and provide evidence based knowledge to associates that work at ShopRite in Flemington, N.J. on easy ways to identify, selected foods, which are beneficial to a similar looking body part. For example, the kidney beans are beneficial to the kidneys except if someone has kidney disease. My aim was to increase the knowledge of ShopRite associates so that they will be able to identify and more importantly recall quickly while shopping what foods are good for what parts of the body. The importance of associating foods that looks like body parts help keep learning simple, fun and informative. The best way to learn is to engage in an activity where learning does not appear to be the objective. Accidental learning can ‘stick’ so that when individuals are trying to incorporate healthy eating options into their diet recalling it will be simple.

Kenneth had the opportunity to serve as chair of a service-learning project and plan the project for the last several weeks. Service-learning projects provide college students with a new method of learning. Kenneth is very active in the community, but planning a project was new so his expectations were low. His expectations changed once his service-learning team put all effort and dedication into the planning process. Kenneth found that serving as the chair of a service-learning project takes analytical and communication skills, dedication, flexibility, firmness, understanding, and hard work. The group discovered that service-learning projects take a great deal of effort and team work. The project strengthened, increased, and developed the

In the document titled, In the service of what? The Politics of Service Learning, authors Kahne & Westheimer, discuss “the moral domain, service learning activities and the two different assumptions regarding political socialization”. Particularly what it means to be a citizen (Kahne & Westheimer, 1996). They describe social sustainability projects as being able to meet students’ needs for “personal relevance and a sense of membership in a community”. One way this can be achieved is by encompassing volunteerism and compassion for the less fortunate and vulnerable individuals in our communities. It is with this definition in mind along with the vision of Bronwyn Sheehan founder of The Pyjama Foundation, that allow me to see the robustness of

The Service-Learning (S-L) is a collaboration between the student health workers and the community which aims to build a healthier population. Included in its goals are shaping the student health workers into responsible individuals upon achieving self-reliance to become role models and servant-leaders in a healthier community, and to develop the new levels of knowledge, attitude, and skills of each health learner.

Involvement in service learning opportunity further develops students’ responsibility as future advanced practice nurses to think critically, prioritize, engage in cost-effective resource utilization, and act in a culturally sensitive manner. These actions and abilities are important to the delivery of care to patients with diverse cultural backgrounds during international experiences.33 Upon returning to the academic setting, the NP student engages in case study construction and discussion, peer education, and self-reflection. The latter is a critical part of them developing cultural

The service learning exercise with the City of Bloomington would have helped learn the content applying to this course if I didn’t find it overwhelming and time consuming when there isn’t a real end result. I found it more of a detriment during the process. It was beneficial when needing to use the terms and ideas that applied to the papers and information gathered and what type of methods we used. The content of this class has a lot of potential and would be useful to focus a little more on the excel section in the beginning and the end. This exercise did push us to get outside our

It is also a “boundary spanning” activity in that it requires active involvement from people both within and outside of the classroom context, often resulting in participant contributors who represent a variety of generations, ethnicities, social groups, and experience levels (Billig and Furco, 2002, p.vii). Service-learning is designed to reduce the boundaries between an institutional campus environment and the community around it. It is designed to connect learning to real experience through service and reflection (Ball and Schilling, 2006; Becker, 2000). As a baseline to facilitate this development, service-learning is distinct from other types of community service and civic engagement experiences in that the service-learning experience must not only have a service and reflective component but also be clearly tied to the curriculum through learning objectives and theoretical underpinnings (Bloomquist, 2015; Pritchard, 2001). As Barbara Holland, former Director of the U.S. National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, shared, “Service-learning is all in the hyphen. It is the enrichment of specific learning goals through structured community service opportunities that respond to community-identified needs and opportunities.” (Kenworthy-U’Ren, Taylor, and Petri, 2006: 121).