Kahne and Westheimer

In The Service of What? The Politics of Service Learning

By: Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer

Extended Comments

This week I chose to do an extended comments post using Ariana’s post.

Ariana started off by comparing our service learning project to the article. I agree that our experiences can have positive effects on the students we are working with, and also on ourselves. Every time that I go to my school, I am always doing something to help. Very rarely will I be standing there with nothing to do. This project helps the school and the classroom we are working with just as much as it provides us with a great experience.

I agree with Ariana’s point that “service learning should be done in order to help and give back to the students’ community or school. Students should use this as a learning experience to better understand what is going on around them.” I think service learning should be more than just getting a signature from a supervisor. That is why I like how we spend time in class discussing our experiences and writing journals about them. I think it’s important to reflect on service learning more in order to get the most out of the experience.

In Ariana’s post she talked about how she had to complete 30 hours over the span of 4 years (which I agree is not a lot at all). For my school it was a little different because I went to a Catholic high school and our community service was included in our senior year religion class. For half a semester of our senior year, we would do community service every Wednesday. Our teachers arranged our placements for us, and they included places like elementary schools, soup kitchens, and nursing homes. I was placed at an elementary school, and I got so much out of the experience. We would spend the other half of the semester learning about the people we would be serving. These topics would include things such as poverty and homelessness. Every week that we went we had to do a discussion board and write journals, similar to what we do for this class. Since we didn’t have to do it on our own time, students never really complained about having to do the service, and it seemed like everyone really got the most they could out of the experiences.

I found connections in this reading to Johnson. Johnson talked about those who are privileged, and what the privileged can do to help those who are not privileged. I think this clearly relates to service learning. If you have the resources and the time to help those around you, you should. We should share our knowledge and our experiences with others who might not get the chance to have that.

Point to Share:

I agree with Ariana that service learning benefits everyone. Personally, I love to volunteer, and it makes me happy to know I am having a positive effect on someone else’s life. I think service learning is important in order to understand what is going on around you, and it doesn’t hurt to give back to your community. As an early childhood teacher I obviously wouldn’t be able to send my students to do community service like you could high school students, but I liked the example in the reading of inviting speakers and researching information to learn about a particular issue in the community, and then coming up with plans to help that group. This could be done with any age.