In the Service of What?

Argument:

In this article, the authors, Kahne and Westheimer, argue that service learning is an important learning experience that everyone should have the opportunity to get involved in at least once, but it is important to do it the right way. They write about two different ways to get involved in a service learning project and that the two can have very different outcomes. There is a service learning for simply charity purposes, and then there is a service learning that can make a change.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with being charitable, because that can be indeed extremely helpful to some people. But service learning for charity is basically just another way of saying "community service." Which, again, isn't a bad thing, but it involves more of just giving the community a few hours of your life and then brushing it off and being done with it. Whereas, service learning for change requires more passion, more research, and more thought. It's not just helping someone out for the sake of making yourself feel good, it's doing it for the sake of trying to make a difference and preventing the reasons why that person needs your help in the first place. Yes, that person may be in need of your services and your help, but why? And how can you, or we as a whole, change that?

It's kind of like what we've already talked about in class: The difference between pity and awareness. We can be involved in service learning either because we feel bad for those people in need and we want to help them so we can feel good about our accomplishments, or because we want to make a difference, and change the fact that these people are so dependent.

"Students tutor, coach softball, paint playgrounds, and read to the elderly because they are interested in people, or because they want to learn a little about poverty and racism before they head out into the waiting corporate world .... We do not volunteer 'to make a statement.'"
We shouldn't go into our service learning thinking "I am so great because I am helping these people who are in need" but rather "I am going to learn so much from this experience and it will help me understand where these people come from and how they feel."

Service learning is all about the learning experience: who you are helping and working with, putting yourself in their shoes and trying your hardest to fully understand them and better their lives. Not so much about the charity work, that's just a small bonus.

Kahne and Westheimer state that it is very important to discuss each other's service learning experiences in class with our peers in order to either get different thoughts and ideas that will help one's service learning experience or just to share what they are involved in. In our FNED class, we do just that. We share our stories and experiences in our schools, are ask questions about certain things we are curious about, and we even connect our experiences to the different readings and subjects we learn about in previous classes.

This video is a great example of the right type of service learning. It provides facts and statistics about the issue they are raising awareness about and then they provide information on what one can do to help.

In class, I want to continue to talk about these two different types of service learning, and about how much more awkward, difficult, and nerve-wracking our service learning project would be if we didn't talk about it as a whole group.