Service-Learning: Making Service Meaningful

Service-Learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction to enrich the learning experience and teach civic responsibility.  Through service-learning, young people—from kindergarteners to college students—use what they learn in the classroom to solve real-life problems. They not only learn the practical applications of their studies, they become actively contributing citizens through the service they perform.

What Service-Learning Looks Like?

If school students collect trash out of an urban streambed, they are providing a valued service to the community as volunteers. If school students collect trash from an urban streambed, analyze their findings to determine the possible sources of pollution, and share the results with residents of the neighborhood, they are engaging in service-learning.

In the service-learning example, in addition to providing an important service to the community, students are learning about water quality and laboratory analysis, developing an understanding of pollution issues, and practicing communications skills. They may also reflect on their personal and career interests in science, the environment, public policy or other related areas. Both the students and the community have been involved in a transformative experience.

Coins for a Cause

Beginning February 28 Lipscomb Academy Elementary School will embark on its own school wide service-learning project called Coins for a Cause.   Over the next month we have asked students to “earn” money through serving others to give to Mission Lazarus.   Students will also engage in several different learning experiences at school to connect their service to Honduras.  For instance, second grade has mapped out the foundation size of a Honduran adobe brick house.  You might see it by the flagpole during carpool.  In PE students are walking or running the distance it would take for a typical Honduran student to walk to school.  In Science students will be investigating and experimenting with water purification.

Each of these examples above shows how service-learning is integrating meaningful community service with instruction and reflection in order to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and serve those who are in need.