Reflective Summary: Service Learning Project

A Service Learning project is one of the project requirements to complete the Bachelors of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree through Ferris State University (FSU). My Service Learning experience was completed at the VA Medical Center (VAMC) in November, 2014. This paper includes details of the facility along with the contact information for the coordinator of the project. A description of my role as a volunteer, critical reflection of my experience, and a synthesis of the Service Learning are also included.

1). How do you believe service learning (SL) is utilized as a tool for fostering civic engagement?

During the spring semester of 2015, I took the Service-Learning course in psychology (Psych 410). The general structure of this course included attending a 70 minutes long class on Mondays and Wednesdays to learn about service learning from the psychology field perspectives, reading scientific articles, conducting literature reviews to broaden my understanding of the subject, and in class constructive discussions with my colleagues. The course required 50 hours of community service at any local organizations or schools. From February 24 to May 8, I volunteered at the Arc of southern Maryland, an organization that provides residential services for individuals with intellectual disability. This organization has several homes in the Leonardtown area. Each home has four to five residents that are grouped based on the developmental disability conditions. As part of the class, I was required to write eight reflection papers about my volunteer site visits that were minimum of one page. Additionally, the class required me to develop a hypothetical program that would be beneficial for the individuals that I worked with.

My service learning experience with the non-profit organization, Off the Front has contributed to my professional development and prepared me more for the business would by enhancing my leadership and communication skills. At every bike repair location, I enhanced my leadership skills by leading other volunteers on what they should work on depending on their level of skills on bike repairs and if they wanted to learn something new, and I knew how to do a repair on the bike, I would gladly teach them. It also enhanced my communication skills by knowing how to communicate to other volunteers and that each individual may require a different communication style and leadership style. It also helped me improve my writing and analysis skills. My writing skills has enhanced by being able to write my service learning marketing plan with my group and making smooth transitions since we got different part. Using my analysis skills to evaluate four years of Off the Front financials through Forms 990 and created balance sheets for years 2013-2016 and broke down the salaries amount by each staff.

Today was another day of my Service Learning, this time I would like to talk more about the students. Each of the students is very different from one another, they act different, they talk different as well as their habits and attitudes. From my person experiences as being a mother and also having some practice from my previous education classes, I easily can define how child is being treated at home. One of the girls in my classroom is very aggressive. Whenever I play with her, she always wants me to be her daughter and herself to be a mother while playing in the kitchen area. She would cook for me and force me to eat; she puts her arms on her waist, stairs at my face and madly tells me that I have to eat it. By observing her, I can tell that she is probably being involved in that type of situation at home. In this case, I just nicely tell her that I am full, and maybe we can play any other game and I try to avoid any other conflicts with her. I saw her doing the same thing with her peers. Mrs. Britanny always notify her whenever she is acting bossy, and tell her that if friends doesn’t want to play she can’t force them.

I found that the materials presented in this course definitely helped to connect with my service learning project. When I first read about this course, I thought it was going to be a difficult task to relate the coursework and the 20 hours of service time to a final paper. However, once I started doing my hours of work, it was almost eerie how the course material was spot on. In addition, if I did view something that was different from the course material, it would motivate me to research the topic further. I really enjoyed the hands on approach to this course. I am a visual learner, so having readings, power point presentations, videos and then conducting the service hours was very beneficial for me.

Last semester as part of my Service Learning requirement I worked with a few other students on the topic of sustainability. We met with Teresa Sidwell from the Benton County Environment Division and she spoke with us about how to be more sustainable. We volunteered in the community by cleaning roads and working at a recycling event in Benton County.

The team will breakdown Ayman’s struggles into multiple power point slides i.e. depression, procrastination, and drug abuse. The presentation will be informative and interactive, allowing an open dialogue within the class. Some of the questions will entail, “Has anybody here experienced or known someone in this particular situation?”. This style of phrasing a question will entice a potential response from the audience.

When I was in my first semester of college as a dual credit student, I was assigned to do a service learning project. For this project, I had to volunteer somewhere for a few hours and then analyze what I saw and experienced. I decided to volunteer at a nursing home and spend some time with the elderly residents there. The experience that I had impacted my outlook on nursing homes and those with mental illnesses. While there, I saw many residents that were physically impaired but I was not prepared to witness so many people with failing minds. I feel like this project really opened my eyes and my heart for those that had once been able to live full lives and were now unable to care for themselves. A few years later, my own grandmother’s

I spent a week preparing my speech from making a PowerPoint to deciding what I was going to say in front of the class. What I might have done is change the hook to a more common question or into the theme of Halloween just for the extra kicks into the presentation. An additional change would be to maybe change the order of the speech ,such as putting the symptoms first then the different types of schizophrenia. The attention grabber was somewhat effective, but it could have been better if I was somewhat more creative and playful with it. The credibility was somewhat easy, a little too easy, to the extent where i occasionally I forgot to cite where I got the information. This tied to the topic was somewhat effective but then

The goal of service learning was to see teaching from a special educator’s perspective. By visiting Kankakee Valley Middle School, I got to learn a little bit more about what it takes to be a special education teacher. Working with students in special education comes with many unique challenges. The teacher has to communicate with parents daily, monitor behaviors, fill out IEPS, teach self-help skills, and much more. Along with all of that, the teacher has to teach the students the curriculum and make alterations when needed. It takes a calm, patient, and hardworking person to work with students that often need a little more support and assistance than their peers. All these qualities and much more were shown by Mr. Bryant and his three assistant

Like I told the instructor on Thursday on our presentation assign day that I have never done a presentation on my own let alone presenting it in a power point. But I did it which means that this was my first power point presentation, and I was very impressed with the outcome. I was pushed to go above and beyond my comfort zone, and that is a true meaning of learning. Finally, I will say that I have so much information to take away by the end of this class it was not easy, but it was worth it. Thank you, Ms Morton, for stretching me and preparing me well enough for further

The hospital environment is filled with an incredible variety of behaviors and attitudes. During my time for the service learning project, there were few that stood out to me. As previously noted, I was able to see the diffusion of responsibility among other volunteers when there were more working on the same shift. Additionally, I saw a very large amount of apprehension in the patients, especially among some of the patients being transported for surgery surgery. Their movements, posture, and tone of voice all spoke for how afraid they were and how significant this point in their life is. This has taught me to simply be more aware of how I’m carrying myself when in the presence of these individuals. It is incredibly important to carry yourself

One thing that I have observed in my service learning is that it can be very easy to fall victim to an electronic scam. I haven’t encountered anyone who has been victimized by a scam yet, but I have observed that some people, regardless of their age, are prone to believe whatever they see on an electronic screen. Many companies communicate with their clients through email, and sometimes people believe an email to be legitimate because it has an official logo on it. It is always good practice to check the sender of the email. This is one thing I have shared with my friends and family before, and I will continue to share it with them in the future so they can better protect themselves. I think that parents should teach their children about recognizing

In the past, I have participated in community service projects. It wasn’t until The Leadership and Professional Development (LPD) class in the fall of 2012 that I was introduced to the idea of service learning. This semester taught me the importance of reflecting on the community service that I performed and actually taking something away from the experience. This semester my team and I had the opportunity to participate in community service activities at The Village at Carver Family YMCA at 1600 Pryor Road. We had the pleasure of working with a wonderful and enthusiastic staff and mentoring some of the local youth. The youth that we mentored ranged from kindergarten