Week 1

“Giving kids clothes and food is one thing but it's much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important, and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.”

-Dolores Huerta

Defining Service Learning

Service-learning Components:
1. Investigation
2. Preparation
3. Action
4. Reflection
5. Evaluation
6. Celebration

Practice Standards:
Integrates learning through academics, applied in an action
Identifies a genuine need in the community
Supports youth voice and choice
Establishes partnerships, or collaborative efforts
Creates reciprocity, or an exchange in information, ideas or skills

Student Outcomes:
Academic development,
Social development, and
Civic engagement


Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of big shoulders.

-Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”

Overview: Addressing Needs

Five Hispanic ELL students, scattered across the corner a small classroom, discuss Walkout, a dramatization of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s and early '70. Students review a question guide, and character by character identify who was in charge, who was secondary in the movement, and who the movement could have done without. Problem solving, listening comprehension, literacy skills, and lessons in history, civics and their own culture make up the Life Skills curriculum for this class.

This is the good stuff that’s happening in Chicago Public Schools. Neither I nor my roommate experienced a class like this in high school – one that is designed to identify, analyze and learn from the impact the leaders had on their community – and then use that information to benefit our own.

Topics in Leadership is part of the Social and Justice Academy, one of three Small Learning Communities designed to engage students in what interests them most. SLC is a grant-based school structuring program piloted last year. It was introduced to the freshman class at 12 different high schools in CPS. Other groups, or “houses,” comprise of the Fine Arts Academy, and the Science, Business and Humanities Academy.

The two schools where I’ll be working, both on the northwest side of Chicago, are participating in SLCs. This is beneficial for service learning since cross-curricular (math, science, English, foreign language, etc.) literature will concentrate on social justice, fine arts, or science, business and humanities, instead of a slew of undefined and unconnected readings. This helps students and teachers define which service-learning activities they’ll design and implement.

At one school in the Fine Arts house, students are reading Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman. Seedfolks takes place in an underdeveloped neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. The neighborhood is plagued with garbage and violence and community members who are scared to make eye contact with one another.

One day, inspired by her father who was a farmer, a young Vietnamese gal dug a few holes and planted lima beans. Neighbors from different ethnicities, nationalities and age groups grew interested, and began to plant. They planted for different reasons: because they were forced to by a social worker, because they heard they could make a profit from selling fresh lettuce to fancy rich-people restaurants, because they needed to make friends, because they wanted to win back a girlfriend’s respect.

It tied the community together is the point. It took this broken, vacant lot and made something from it. It’s imaginative and all-together doable.

The Fine Arts Academy plans to analyze the characters and perform pieces from each through dance, theatre or visual art to local elementary schools. Service learning through art is one of my favorites because art – performing and visual - is underrated in our society, yet totally transformative.

Other transformative projects:

Health awareness after reading Fast Food Nation
Awareness and presentations on domestic violence against women inspired by In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Education on how Of Mice and Men relates to the lives of these high school students