by Matt Robinson
To help youth learn valuable lessons is a privilege. To be able to help one’s community is also a privilege. To be able to do both, and to know that the return to all will be compounded—that is service-learning.
For those unfamiliar with the term, service-learning is a teaching strategy through which students are challenged to identify, research, and address real community problems and needs, using knowledge and skills learned in the classroom.
What does that look like in real life?
I was recently talking with a fifth grade teacher who transformed a student’s outrage into a service-learning project and in so doing experienced these compounded benefits firsthand.
It started with an opportunity that could have been merely a disappointment or even a disruption. One of her students returned from his classroom job of emptying the paper-recycling box into the receptacle in the custodians’ closet very upset. The student had seen the custodian empty the receptacle into a large trash bag, and had asked, “Hey, where does that go?” The custodian replied, “I throw it into the Dumpster. The guy who used to pick it up stopped. I think he moved.” The student reported this to the rest of the class. This upset them all. They wanted to do something.
The teacher resisted her first impulse to start solving the problem herself. She had recently been inspired to kindle her students’ civic skills, and she saw this as an opportunity. “What can we do to recycle the paper here?” she asked. After a short but lively discussion they had many more questions than answers. The entire class committed to learning more.
The next week the teacher read the class The Lorax as part of a reading lesson. That made them even more committed to solving the problem. Then the town’s Recycling and Solid Waste Director visited them. She told them all about the costs and benefits of the town’s recycling program. “The State Planning Office,” she told them, “has a lot of information on this topic on their website.” She also said she was unaware that the school’s waste paper was no longer being recycled and that she was upset about it, too. “Will you help me to do more recycling here?” The class was even more committed to finding a solution to this problem.
Over the next few weeks the students gathered information about waste, recycling, their school and their community. They collected the school’s waste paper for a week and weighed it. They also collected cafeteria waste, donned rubber aprons and gloves, and separated recyclable material from the food waste and weighed each. Through this investigation, they confirmed their belief that waste paper was a problem, but the data led them to wonder if other waste, like food scraps, was an even bigger problem.
As part of a math lesson the fifth-graders used the figures the Recycling and Solid Waste Director gave them to determine how much the paper, plastic, glass, and metal that could be recycled was worth. Then they calculated the cost to the town to put all that material into a landfill, where it would not be of any use to anyone.
A representative from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension visited the class to help them think about setting up a composting program for the school’s food scraps. The science behind composting was hard but fascinating! Who knew that food scraps could be so useful? Some of the students said that they now understood why their parents were so picky about their compost pile at home. The food waste generated at the school, they decided, could be composted and used in the town’s community garden plots.
“All this stuff we are just throwing away. We have to do more.” The class was excited to do all the work, but their teacher helped them realize that they needed help. Informing other people and helping them to understand was a big job. They looked for ways to reach their community, especially their elected officials.
The annual science fair exhibit assignment took on a new purpose. The class was divided into task force teams to create presentations to inform others in town of the opportunities to make good use of all kinds of waste. The students created colorful graphs depicting the tons of waste coming from the school that could be recycled. They built a model composter to show how the cafeteria’s food scraps could become compost. The students even included a plan to collect and transport the compost.
The members of the town’s select board and school board were invited to the science fair. At the event, the teams outlined why action was necessary and what was needed from the town officials to support the solutions. The adults were astonished and moved to action.
I left out some of the finer points to this story, but essentially, with their teacher’s help, these students used their developing knowledge and skills to improve their community. That is service-learning.
Click below to learn about other service-learning projects:
K-12 service-learning resources and project ideas
The National Service-Learning Clearinghouse
For higher education service-learning examples
Have an idea for a project that you would like to talk about? Email me!
Matt Robinson is an Education Consultant with KIDS Consortium and is a guest blogger.
