Service Learning

Today I focused at work on service learning - thinking about what we do and how we do it.  A few years ago, I wrote an article about how service learning is a form of activism for teachers. I wrote it as an attempt to reconcile my passion for activism with my love for the work that I do as a teacher. Upon reflection, I realized that the two were not mutually exclusive, but in fact were important complements to each other. I have never looked back.

Recognizing Teacher Activism

Continuing revelation invites us to remain open to looking at the same things in new ways.  I recently experienced the magic of continuing revelation when I heard a speech that sparked my realization that I am a teacher activist. The speech was by philanthropist and activist Larry Brilliant, who said that Dr. Martin Luther King’s message of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice can only prove true if everyone who cares about social justice enthusiastically serves as an activist struggling on its behalf.  At first I felt guilty because I do not have any role labeled “activism” in my life, but then I thought back to my experience in the Friends Council on Education’s Institute for Engaging Leadership, the major lesson of which for me was that one’s impact is not dependent on one’s title.  In the program we engaged in action research projects in which each month we were expected to take an action step within our school and then reflect on that action and how it could lead to our next step. The confidence I gained from the power of these small yet continual shifts in the direction of progress is a spirit that I have since tried to instill in my students.  In a true Quaker sense of speaking truth to power, I encourage students to not accept the world as it is, but to continually assess how they might make it better. After Dr. Brilliant’s talk I came to realize that my activism doesn’t have to take the familiar form of protests and petitions, but as a teacher activist I am contributing to bending that arc toward justice by sowing the seeds of action in students.  My goal as a teacher activist is to help my students discover their own power and passion as activists.

My activism begins with my belief in the “real world” importance of the material I teach.  Within my first year of becoming a history teacher, I understood that history has a power to teach us about the present and help us to shape the future.  The turning point for me was over spring break of 2008 when Barack Obama delivered his “More Perfect Union” speech just as my class was about to study the American Revolution.  I was able to see the connection between the values that our country was founded on and the challenges we were facing at the time.  It was clear that the connections that Obama was making between the past and the present were important for students to be able to see and to create for themselves.  Since then my courses have consistently presented historical material in a context of engagement with the modern world.  I encourage students to introduce current events into our historical conversations and I regularly bring in articles or topics for students to discuss to aid in cementing those connections.  I use guiding questions for my courses that ask students to consider how societies are best able function in ways that reflect peace, justice and equality (and what leads societies away from those values), so that students feel empowered to use the history they study to analyze the world today.  One element of my activism is using the history I teach to help students understand the power of individuals in the context of the modern world.  

Once we have established that understanding, I try to usher my students toward recognizing their own role in changing the world for the better.  To do this, I ask students to work on real life applications of the academic material.  My first such endeavor was a club working against the Darfur genocide, whose creation I encouraged as a project for freshmen boys whose energy needed some redirection.  That program was as important for the ways that it had an impact on them as it was for the money they raised for Darfur.  When I taught Latin American History, my students’ final project was crafting their own version of public service announcements based on what they had learned over the course of the year.  This project offered students an opportunity for activism, and the videos ranged from one geared toward consumer education that included a group of my students holding up signs at a grocery for people not to buy bananas from companies known to use child labor, to one that offered facts about different Latin American presidential candidates for voter education, to one made for our school administrators about the importance of Latin American history.  Most recently, my activism has been in the form of service learning projects.  Last year my Global Studies classes, which had the theme of being the change one wishes to see in the world, had global service learning group projects, for which students helped organizations through volunteering after school or over weekends, and then writing a paper on what they learned about a region of the world through their service and how they could continue to have an impact.  Students were able to more deeply connect to the global regions they were studying while recognizing how they could make a difference.  This work has been an important element of my activism – helping students move from the theoretical to the practical.  

I have always seen teaching as my way of making a difference in the world.  What I now understand is that this is a form of activism.  I am not just teaching students about history, but I am seeking to empower my students to understand historical and societal patterns well enough to be comfortable visualizing their roles in working toward local and global solutions.  My activism involves introducing my students to the voice and capacity that they each have within themselves. I accomplish that by meeting my students where they are - answering to that of God in each of them and encouraging them to use their unique gifts in the service of others. And just as the Institute of Engaging Leadership at Friends Schools allowed me to be a pebble for change with ripple effects to my students, my hope is that my students will each become his or her own pebble, while cyclically pairing reflection and action.  What I have come to believe (and share with my students) is that we should not judge ourselves on how big our sphere of influence is, but rather on what we do with it.  We each have a calling; we need only be open to it and act on it.  As teachers, we are in a position to not only be actors for our own passions, but also to inspire passion in the next generation in the hope that they too will pay it forward.

Since claiming my place as a teacher activist, I have embraced a new role as Social Action Director at my school.  I am still doing the same work in my classroom, but I also get to support students all forms of their activism and support teachers in bringing service learning and social action into the classroom.  As I work with teachers, I can speak not only to my own experiences, but also introduce them to the community and tradition of teacher activism that I have discovered.  One friend invites representatives from organizations that work with Africa to her African history classes’ presentations on potential solutions to societal challenges faced in Africa (such as AIDS), and the organizations then dialogue with the students, helping them to understand the realities of the material they are engaging with in class.  Another friend has her English class work on resumes for people in homeless shelters trying to find employment as a part of her persuasive writing unit.  My friends in science have taken their students to study and work toward solutions in particularly polluted parts of our area, and a friend in math has encouraged her students to focus their statistics projects on areas of social concern in which their results can make a difference.  Teacher activism doesn’t even have to be subject specific – one friend has Social Action Mondays each week in her class, in which the class decides on a relevant social action step they can take that week (like not buying certain products or performing certain acts of kindness), which they then reflect on each Friday. I appreciate being able to hold up these examples for my colleagues, illustrating that teacher activism takes many forms.  My new role empowers me to help others to claim their place as teacher activists.  We can all take pride in our work of bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice in and out of our classrooms.