At the end of October, three million people -- many of them children and teens -- will roll up their sleeves for national Make a Difference Day. Billed as the "national day of doing good," this one-day community service event can help introduce the concepts citizenship and civic engagement to students who participate.
Yet evidence suggests one-day service events can have pitfalls. Without sustained, direct interaction with the community being "served," or pre- and post-reflection, students can learn to oversimplify societal problems. In addition, the service they perform can lead to "Band-Aid" solutions and can reinforce, rather than reduce, students' stereotypes about recipients.
Service-learning presents an alternative to one-day service activities.
Service-learning combines community service with in-school curriculum, to the benefit of both the community and the classroom. It's been proven to reinforce skills learned in the classroom and improve students' interest in school. Research shows service-learning has an added benefit: When woven into the curriculum, community service can become an effective tool for teaching tolerance and reducing student bias.
According to the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, service-learning has been proven to:
- Reinforce values of justice and compassion;
- Helps students develop a keener awareness of diversity;
- Improve students' feeling of connection to their community.
By pairing community involvement with classroom learning, service-learning also increases the likelihood students will gain a more nuanced understanding of social issues, and that they will learn to empower -- not "help" -- often-marginalized communities.
Teachers across the country use Make A Difference Day to complement or reinforce service-learning projects in their classroom. Teaching Tolerance offers the following suggestions and resources to help your students start a service-learning project of their own.
Tafeni English, Jennifer Holladay, Camille Jackson and Rhonda Thomason contributed to this edition of the ABCs. |
