Provides Structured Time for Reflection
(Note: Academic content standards adopted by the State Board of Education are shown in italics.)
Students will understand and reflect on the significance of their service-learning experience and how applying skills and knowledge affects their community, themselves as individuals, and their own learning.
Example: Eleventh-grade students in a U.S. history class select the theme of poverty for the semester-long course. After brainstorming issues related to the theme, students identify community agencies at which they might volunteer throughout the semester. The teacher and staff from a local volunteer center help students identify service placements that match course expectations and community needs with each student's interests. Students volunteer at after-school tutoring programs, child care centers, soup kitchens, and food banks in nearby low-income neighborhoods. Throughout the semester, the teacher assigns readings related to poverty. Each student maintains a journal in which he or she records reflections on the volunteer experience and how it relates to the study of poverty, American democracy, and the people who have been served through the student's volunteerism. (History-Social Science Content Standards, Grade Eleven, U.S. History and Geography: Continuity and Change in the Twentieth Century 11.6.3—Discuss the human toll of the Depression, natural disasters, and unwise agricultural practices and their effects on the depopulation of rural regions and on political movements of the left and right, with particular attention to the Dust Bowl refugees and their social and economic impacts in California; 11.11.6—Analyze the persistence of poverty and how different analyses of this issue influence welfare reform, health insurance reform, and other social policies; 11.11.7—Explain how the federal, state, and local governments have responded to demographic and social changes such as population shifts to the suburbs, racial concentrations in the cities, Frostbelt-to-Sunbelt migration, international migration, decline of family farms, increases in out-of-wedlock births, and drug abuse.)
