Service Learning and the University Student

INTRODUCTION "I read and forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. " Confucius The inert knowledge problem . "the teaching of students to acquire stores of knowledge that are quite useless to them when they are in new situations, (pg. 8 Alfred North Whitehead)" "Teachers can communicate concepts and information. Changing ones perspective and expanding ones framework for understanding reality more often comes from the students personally engaging challenges they view as significant, (pg 8 Robert Cunningham.)" This article is about how service learning and experiential learning affect university students who do the service. Experiential learning may be broadly defined and may range from fields such as anthropology, biology, agriculture, and classics. Service learning requires that something be given to the community and or individuals who receive this service. Robert Coles (1993) in The Call of Service, details how Harvard students were transformed through their service learning experiences with him. He cites scholars who influenced him and helped shape his theory of service. Two of these are Dorothy Day and William Carlos Williams. I'm writing this book to explore the service "we offer to others, and not incidentally to ourselves. I'm hoping to document the subjectivity, the phenomenology of service: the many ways such activities are rendered; the many irrationalities, impulses, and values served in the implementation of our particular efforts; the achievements that take place along with the missed steps and failures; the personal opportunities and hazards and the consequences-how this kind of work fits into life, (Coles 1993, pg.xxiv). " This powerful paragraph from Coles clearly elucidates that by serving others we are also serving ourselves. We learn though successes as well as failures. In working in Urban Title 1 schools for seven years all who have participated have experienced the thoughts, feelings, and actions described by Coles. More than once we may have wanted to give up. Not because of the students being served but because of the systems that appear so callous on occasion, immune to the teachers, administrators, and the students' feelings and so slow to act, if they act at all! Coles remarks may be an antidote to the sad state of affairs regarding contemporary American society, (Putnam, 2000) and American schools, (Rothstein, 2004). By serving others and ourselves we may be beginning to build a sense of community that existed in America at the beginning of the 20th century according to Putnam. It is difficult to argue with Putnam when he describes social, personal, and religious life and documents that we don't go to others homes for dinner or to play cards and that membership in religious organizations is declining in all major faith based groups except Catholicism due to the Latino membership; but Evangelical churches are seeing a rise in membership because they are bonders as opposed to bridgers. Bridgers reach out to the community. Bonders build relationship within their own groups. Hence, if you have a bonding organization you do not have the development of community that you would with bridgers. "Years later when I went back to the Worker to be a part of it and to visit Dorothy Day again I had begun to see how complicated their delivery of service is, how it is a function of not only what we do but who we are (which of course gives shape to what we do, Coles 1993, pg. XXVI)". Coles in this comment taps into the perennial question of, do clients get better because of the helper or the help? With the rising emphasis of post-modernism the helper and relationships designed by the helper gain preeminence over the help or even science or theory. Human service fields have been dealing with this dilemma for years. Theorists such as Sidney Jourard and Arthur Combs and by extension William Glasser have adumbrated the importance of the relationship or involvements for many years. …