Perspectives Of Community Members And Parents

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.

Parent and Community involvement does not occur overnight. I feel that schools must make parent and community involvement a priority, valuing and accepting each other’s differences. Schools, families and communities must work together to support all students in a learning environment to ensure every student is a successful learner. Positive family and school involvement fosters a partnership among my school encouraging students to reach their highest potential academically and in life. Parent and community involvement does not mean stay-at-home mothers coming to school to help as needed, or a businessman stopping by to see events occurring on campus. The role of school, family and community involvement is a partnership incorporating goal-oriented activities for all grade levels linked to academic success and student growth.

In order to be an effective educator, one must understand the community represented in the learning environment. Through the service learning project, many pre-service teachers identified they needed to learn the community in which their student population resides in order to effectively teach those individuals. One participant noted that the service learning project, “opened [their] eyes to a world [they] thought about fleetingly, but never tried to change”.

* Environment: The environment that initially shapes our development is our home. As we mature, the locations in which we interact will shape our development.

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).

Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) is a nonprofit university that offers exemplary undergraduate and graduate education in the liberal arts and professional disciplines. During my time at SCSU, I am fortunate to have worked as a student worker and currently I work as a graduate assistant for the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE) program. Being able to serve as a graduate assistant in a nonprofit university encompasses a great deal of responsibilities and reward. For instance, I work with New haven residents to identify and tackle social and health issues identified by the community. I also work alongside the resident partners to build relationships with other neighborhood leaders and community organizations who have diverse knowledge, expertise, and skills. In addition, I help to create health activities with community residents, conduct outreach about neighborhood-level projects, and assist with research-related activities.

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.

During the 1980’s as service learning was languishing and trying to find its place in the spectrum of higher education curricula, a very critical event helped propel service learning back into the spotlight. In 1985, Campus Compact was founded and began reinvigorating public and community service on campuses and began to move service learning from individual pioneer efforts to a more institutionalized effort (Campus Compact, 2014). Campus Compact was created by a group of visionary college presidents who believed in community service and engagement efforts. It was created to help colleges and universities coordinate outreach

According to Kathleen Flecky and Lynn Gitlow, service-learning is defined as, “learning that occurs in experiences, reflection, and civic engagement” (Flecky & Gitlow, 2011). In recent years more universities are implementing service learning into their curriculum. A key concept of service learning is civic responsibility. Civic responsibility can simply be defined as your responsibilities as a citizen. As will be shown later in this paper, service learning can have many benefits not only to a student, but also to the community members

I originally thought that communities and families were separate entities where communities were a place that families went to work and where they spent their leisure time. After reading the chapter, I now realize that communities and families are intertwined and both support one another, as explained on pages three and four from the textbook Families, Schools, and Communities: Together for Young Children. Communities and families mold each other through cultural norms and this has an impact on how and what our children learn at home and school. Another significant point that I learned this chapter was believing that a family should support their own children was an untraditional idea (Couchenour, 2014, p. 6). These two concepts I learned

A further problem that often arises in service-learning courses is found in both the reluctance and inability of some community organizations to initiate contact with institutions participating in community-engaged programs. According to Eli Goldblatt in his article “Alinsky’s Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects,” a majority of service-learning programs are “heavily oriented toward student- and faculty-based outreach into underserved communities,” therefore, “we seldom hear of community-based learning projects initiated by community partners themselves” (275). Situations such as this may lead to community partners who are allowed no true contribution to the goals and potential outcomes of the projects

Over the past 16 weeks I have had the opportunity to volunteer in the learning experience and growth of a young child. The environment I was able to be involved with was one of the many elementary schools within the Oceanside School District, San Luis Rey Elementary. This school is a Kindergarten through fifth grade school consisting of approximately 350 multicultural, multi-language, lower socioeconomic students with fully credentialed instructors providing education. There are no more than three classes of each grade with some grades only having one class. I had the privilege to provided help within one of two second grade class consisting of approximately 24-28 students, mostly boys. Several of the students were English as a second language learner, which presented difficulty in their learning process. Within this reflection paper I hope to present my personal connections and growth through the process of service-learning, along with how this impacts the relationship of social justice.

The population selected for this community assessment are residents who reside in public housing. Most residents are on a fixed income and many are unemployed. The complex is comprised of those who are elderly, disabled, single mothers, single fathers, some two parent households, many children, undocumented persons, those who are refugees and some who do not speak English. In addition, most residents in these communities are minorities who are Latino or African American. The residents take great pride in their community and are very vocal about its history; they do not hesitate to help others and community relationships can be easily observed by watching their interactions with one another. The children are inquisitive and their sense of family is demonstrated in the care they give to their younger siblings, as well as friends. This community values, mutual aid, respect and family. It also evident that the families value education and like any other parent or relative want to see the younger generations accomplishing and doing more than they have done. Many of the children

The parent and community involvement program that I would design would incorporate social and learning opportunities for parents and community member to become active with their English language development. Offering free Adult English Language classes where parents and community members could attend 2-3 nights a week would be an aggressive approach in acquiring the English language. But in the real world, this is extremely difficult for a lot of people to commit to. Some parents work long hours in physically demanding jobs and have young children that they need to tend to when they get home. I would have this program available for those that could participate, but also offer monthly courses that parents or members of the community could attend without having to commit to the entire program. They could attend the sessions that they are interested in and that fit in their schedule. This program would help parents connect with their child’s school community and would also benefit the student. Each month of the school year would focus on a specific topic that would engage parents in the school community.

Service learning is a lot more than helping someone for the sake of it, it is a process of involving yourself in community service activities engaging and learning while combined with facilitated means by being able to apply the experience to academic and personal development. A good service-learning partnership is mutually beneficial, with both the learning goals of the course and the needs of the community partner being met.