Service-Learning: A Perfect Fit for Me

By: Sue Wilson

It seems like community service has always been a part of who I am as an individual. I grew up in a rural community and was taught the importance of helping others in our neighborhood. As a high school student, I belonged to clubs that focused on servicing local organizations. After I was married, my husband and I passed on these values to our children. They too learned and embraced the importance of giving back. For many years, our summer vacations were spent helping others on mission trips to Detroit, Pittsburg, Kentucky, West Virginia, or border towns in Mexico.

When the opportunity to work on a second career became available, I decided to become a teacher. Five years later in my new teaching position, I was introduced to service-learning at a workshop led by my soon-to-be mentors and friends, Renee Weaver-Wright and Deb Wagner. Service-learning was a perfect fit for me. I was excited to be able to combine classroom learning with community service. I couldn’t wait to get started!

My first project was a hit with my eighth grade language arts and social studies students. The class novel we were reading focused on the time era of the Great Depression. My students expressed interest in learning more about that time period from those who actually experienced it. (Talk about youth voice!) So we did some investigating and discovered a vibrant Senior Center in our community that had seniors that were old enough to remember some stories about the Great Depression. My students wanted to interview them and create Legacy Booklets about the senior’s life. After bringing in a newspaper editor to teach us how to interview others, we then contacted the Senior Center. We asked Mrs. Bartoes, the Senior Center director, to talk to us about senior citizens and how they might react when interviewed about the Great Depression. Students worked with their peers to write interview questions, then practiced interviewing each other before they met with their seniors. What resulted was an incredible intergenerational experience with eighth graders and senior citizens listening, learning, talking, writing, and laughing. Their final products, the Legacy Booklets, were presented to the senior citizens and their families at an Ice Cream Social held at our school. My eighth graders were empowered and learned more about language arts, history, and serving their community than any textbook could have taught them.

I continue to use service-learning (the Clarkston Community Schools district calls it Academic Service Learning or ASL) in my classroom to give my students the opportunity to take their learning to the next level. ASL is a tool not a program that I use to teach skills in language arts, civic responsibility, and leadership. All students, no matter what their background or learning level, can benefit from experiencing ASL. I can’t imagine teaching without it!

P.S. Cathryn Berger-Kaye taught me the importance of surrounding my students with inspiring service-learning quotes. My favorite:

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
- Aristotle

Sue Wilson is a teacher with Clarkston Community Schools, a former Learn and Serve – Michigan grantee. She also received the 2010 Outstanding Service-Learning Award for a K-12 Teacher/Practitioner.