Posts Tagged ‘community’

Research supporting service-learning

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Yesterday I blogged about a crisis (or opportunity) for service-learning in schools.

This is based on a new report Community Service and Service-Learning in America’s Schools by the Corporation for National & Community Service.

In a nutshell, the report confirms a decade long decline in more formal, curriculum based service-learning. However, it also shows a recent slight upward trend in school support for youth doing community service work.

But here’s why the decline in service-learning is worrisome. From the report’s summary:

Research confirms that service-learning is a strong vehicle for enhancing and deepening the learning experience to improve both civic and academic behaviors. Service-learning can also diminish “risky behavior” and behavioral problems at school and help students develop social confidence and skills. While community service also has positive impacts on students, service-learning offers a much more substantial service experience through structured activities that give youth leadership roles and connect the activities to reflection and learning.

“Schools across America have rallied around community service and they are to be applauded,” said Dr. Robert Grimm, the Corporation’s Director of Research and Policy. “But research shows that service-learning offers more meaningful service opportunities for students and has numerous impacts on both students’ civic and academic success. Service helps learning come alive. It is time to put learning back into service.”

Other key findings of the study include:

  • The majority of school districts do not provide service-learning policies, according to school principals. Only 19 percent of school principals report that their districts have a policy that promotes service-learning, and 28 percent of principals do not know whether their district has such a policy.
  • Elementary schools are the least likely to offer service-learning activities. 20 percent of elementary schools have service-learning programs, compared to a quarter of middle schools and over a third (35%) of high schools. Furthermore, over half (51%) of elementary school principals believe their students are too young to engage in service-learning.
  • The class gap in service learning is decreasing but still exists. Schools in low-income areas are significantly less likely to have service-learning activities than other schools. In 1999, schools in low-income areas were 36 percent less likely to have service-learning activities; in 2008 they were only 26 percent less likely to offer service-learning. Still, only 20 percent of schools in low-income areas currently offer service-learning activities compared to 27 percent of schools that are not in low-income areas.

More research from Learn & Serve America on the Impact of Service-Learning:
Research studies of service-learning, an educational method that intentionally connects community service to classroom learning, demonstrate that service-learning programs can have positive impacts on youth in three general areas: academic engagement and achievement; civic attitudes and behaviors; and social and personal skills. The studies also demonstrate that students gain the maximum benefit when their service-learning experience includes a direct tie to the curriculum, planning and design of service projects by students, structured reflection on the service experience in the classroom, and continuity of service for at least one semester. This issue brief offers some of the most compelling evidence to date on how service-learning positively affects youth. Issue Brief on “The Impact of Service-Learning: A Review of Current Research” (PDF)

Sylvia

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A crisis (or opportunity) for service-learning in schools

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

A recently released report “Community Service and Service-Learning in America’s Schools” by the Corporation for National & Community Service, analyzes trends in service-learning for youth.

The numbers are interesting – the percentage of K-12 schools who say they “recognize” or “arrange” student participation in community service remains high. Although down slightly from a whopping 92% in 1979, it increased from 83% to 86% in the nine years since the last survey. But the study confirms a downward trend in school service-learning, from 32 percent in 1999 to 24 percent in 2008.

Community service is different from service-learning. Service-learning has clear curriculum and learning objectives, and is integrated into classes and subjects. So for a school, service-learning is a bigger commitment that requires funding, resources, and attention, all of which are in short supply these days.

Peter Levine blogged this past week about this crisis in the service-learning movement. Peter is director of CIRCLE, (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) out of Tufts University which conducts research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25.

He says,

“It’s my sense that the movement for service-learning has reached a crisis point. It isn’t included in federal education law; it isn’t a priority in an era of concern about reading and math; the federal funding has been cut (in real terms) since 2001; and the quality of programs is so uneven that outsiders could be reasonably skeptical about its value.”

Dan Butin of The Education Policy Blog blames this directly on NCLB, “In such an age of standardized accountability, of course service-learning offerings would be minimized and marginalized. And especially when a reform effort at the K-12 level is not rooted deeply, it becomes a casualty of another innovative pedagogical and curricular offering left behind in an age of all too many things left behind.”

Of course, every crisis brings the opportunity for creative solutions. Peter goes on:“On the other hand, the best programs are superb; they fit the outlook of the incoming administration; and there is strong support for service-learning in the Kennedy-Hatch Serve-America bill that both Senators McCain and Obama promised to sign. That bill would direct most resources to poor districts, which today are much less likely to offer service-learning. So we could be poised for improvements in quality, quantity, and equality. Or else service-learning could falter if Kennedy-Hatch isn’t fully funded and the grassroots movement continues to shrink.”

Yes, we can!
The time could not be better to reinvigorate service-learning in schools. Schools can become centers of community redevelopment, eco-awareness, technology support, and service. With support and funding,  service-learning could transform lives of youth and bring community benefits — especially in poor neighborhoods where the need is greatest and these programs have the most impact.

Direct link to report: Community Service and Service-Learning in America’s Schools 2008 (PDF)

Sylvia

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Community of interest or community of practice?

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk around the edu-blogs and at conference sessions about online learning communities, or building a personal learning network as part of a educator’s professional development. Often, these are referred to as “Communities of Practice” – a term coming into common use only a few years ago. Many educators were introduced to the term in grad school through the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who wrote Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives (Amazon link) in 1985.

Their book explored how natural learning that takes place in apprenticeship situations, and profiled several different Communities of Practice (CoPs) from around the world. The “practice” part of CoP is the work they do, and the learning takes place in context, or situated, in the common work. These groups of people learn to do their work not by lectures, but by everyone working together, from experts to newcomers, and most importantly, by talking about their work together.

The concept of “Legitimate Peripheral Participation” is key to the idea of communities of practice. This is when newcomers learn needed skills by doing work that is on the periphery of the community, and as they prove their competence, being invited into more important roles. The other part of legitimate peripheral participation is how newcomers move into the community through talk. The shared stories of the community, particularly war stories told by experts, are part of the experience. Newcomers learn to participate by learning the traditions and vocabulary of the group, first by listening, then by trying out their new verbal skills within the group, and if their words ring true, by moving from the periphery and becoming more central to the shared expertise of the group.

It’s obvious that this sounds similar to what happens to educators as they break down the walls of their classroom and use new technologies to find and participate in new communities.

I think, however, that we confuse different kinds of communities. Specifically, I think that educators who come together in online communities, or even temporary real life groups, are more often than not, communities of interest, not communities of practice.

I’m not just being picky about semantics here – the problem is that calling any community a “Community of Practice” presumes that it will have similar benefits and impact.

In Second Life, for example, a teacher may meet educators from around the world who are doing similar things in their classroom, have similar hopes about the future of ed tech, and share similar frustrations. They may find the interaction refreshing, educational, and maybe even inspiring. These professional collegial interactions are too often missing from teacher’s lives. And Second Life is just an example. This could be Twitter, or a social network, an online group created for a graduate school class, or even people you meet face to face at a conference.

However, just having similar work doesn’t mean that this is a community of practice. They really aren’t doing the same work. Once this interaction is over, they have to go back to their real place of practice, their classroom and school. The benefits of shared vocabulary, shared experiences, shared stories are all gone. Now these teachers have to sit in meetings where no one is on the same page, frustrated that everyone isn’t seeing the light.

In fact, these outside communities of interest may serve to pull teachers away from their local communities of practice, distancing them from the colleagues whose mindshare would be vital to real local change. It’s an all too convenient place to vent about everyone who “doesn’t get it.”

It’s hard for me to imagine any kind of educational change that doesn’t draw on the participants at the ground level, meaning the people in the school. That’s why I advocate for student participation in education technology initiatives. Changing a community means involving the stakeholders, all the stakeholders, in the process. Building a healthy community of practice in the place of the actual practice is a first step to change.

Sylvia

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Posted in conferences, education reform, professional development, second life | 14 Comments »