Faculty • Students • Community • Publications
Culminating Projects • PeaceJam Northwest

1. What Is Service Learning?
2. Community Benefits of Service Learning
3. What You Can Do
4. Connections to School Reform
5. Developing Meaningful Projects
6. Community Resources
7. Parent Resources

Service-Learning: An Effective Way to Teach

By involving students in hands-on learning, problem solving, and applications of academic knowledge in real settings, service learning can increase students' academic achievement in challenging subjects. When we enrich students' experiences with service activities that enable them to make valued contributions to the community, we can also create a sense of engagement that enhances a student's motivation to complete school. ó Richard W. Riley, former Secretary, U.S. Department of Education.

"The brain tends to discard information for which it finds no connection or meaning or for which the meaning is obscure. The brain is designed to perceive patterns and connections. The basis for good teaching is combining an information-rich subject -matter content with an experience-rich context of application." -Dale Parnell, Oregon State University

Service-Learning: An Effective Way to Address Community Needs

Not only do students learn more by serving their communities, but their communities prosper as their students learn. Students throughout Washington have served their communities in the following ways:

Community Development

Soap Lake Middle School students won a national award for their community problem-solving program that involved students in restoring a local park which now attracts tourists and makes the community more attractive for young and old alike.

Concrete Middle School. This timber-impacted community has involved students to help revitalize their local community to make it much more attractive to tourists by developing an exercise track, creating a handicapped-accessible trail, developing a walking tour guide for families, and revitalizing a park at the entrance of their town to draw tourists.

Civil and Intergenerational Relations

In Spokane, West Valley Middle School students provide stimulating activities and meals for senior citizens in their community. In addition, they provide thousands of service hours to the Humane Society and other community agencies.

Gig Harbor High School recently won a national award for service to homeless families.

Students in Nooksack Valley Senior High School's service-learning courses now provide thousands of hours annually to senior citizens, young children, and the literacy corps.

Public Health

Cleveland High School students have done research on the health hazards of Puget Sound seafoods.

Students have provided health awareness programs to thousands of elementary students.

Service-learning can help enable communities to move from a dependency on federal programs to a local structure for community development.

Benefits for Schools and the Community

Service-Learning:

• Enables students to apply the core curriculum, while teaching and reinforcing job readiness skills.
• Prepares students to be contributing members of their families, communities, and country.
• Enables youth to feel valued in their school and community
• Expands locations for authentic learning to include "nonprofit" and civic organizations.
• Makes Learning Authentic.
  Projects can enable students to apply what they are learning to real problems rather than simulations. They provide real world rather than arbitrary teacher assessments of success.
• Develops Problem Solving Skills. Nothing teaches solving better than addressing a real problem which has real consequences. By identifying significant issues and by providing technical assistance, business can help nurture critical thinking and the application of problem solving.
• Fosters Team Work Skills. Most corporate and community problems require that students work with adults and fellow students to complete the task.
• Changes a school partnership so it is mutually beneficial and so the school is viewed as a resource to the broader community. Too often schools view themselves as powerless, dependent upon the mercy of corporate contributions. By expanding the opportunities for school to genuinely assist your company, you will enable schools and students to see themselves as a vital resource. You also help more people in the community to personally benefit from the role the school can play.
• Enables Students be Worker/Producers rather than Passive Recipients. Young people are a vital resource and we need to draw on them to help solve community problems.
• Enables the Business-Partner to Work Smarter and More Cost Effectively. As more and more businesses begin to "tighten their belts", it is even more important that they rethink many of the ways they go about doing business.
• Builds greater public interest and support by youth and schools by placing students in the community as helpers who meet community needs.
• Fosters an Ethic of Service/Community Contribution.
  By encouraging students to contribute, you are also investing in the long term well being of your community. Research indicates that people who are involved in the community as children are more likely to contribute as adults.

Utilizing students as a resource that can help your business more effectively serve their customers or deliver a service in a more cost effective way will enable these companies to do a better job.

What is needed is not a new form of school, not more of the same only better, but a new form of schooling-a form of community life in which living, working and learning are united.

-John Abbott

1. What Is Service Learning?
2. Community Benefits of Service Learning
3. What You Can Do
4. Connections to School Reform
5. Developing Meaningful Projects
6. Community Resources
7. Parent Resources