Service Learning aims to teach students beyond textbooks and outside the classroom through volunteer opportunities.
“It’s a strategy of teaching that faculty can use that’s very engaging for students,” David Bodary, Service Learning coordinator and associate professor in Communication said. “They become actively involved in the process of service in some capacity, that then helps to reinforce, or even deepen, content from their courses. Sometimes the best understanding comes from an example.”
The project the students participate in becomes part of their graded work for the class.
Service Learning begins when the teacher offers the opportunity for the class to participate in a Service Learning project. Students engage in the project, then they are asked to complete an essay about the experience afterward.
He said this is beneficial, because it gives the students the opportunity to reflect on their involvement.
“We make those connections between the book that we read in class, and then the experience that they’ve had, and it’s critical that they have those moments to reflect and make those connections,” he said. “Like anything, if you don’t reflect on what you’ve done on why it did or didn’t work, you’re not going to learn anything from it. In the same way, if we don’t reflect on our learning, we can’t necessarily repeat it and we can’t necessarily benefit from the experience.”
He said Service Learning can take shape in several forms, such as students in the Automotive department servicing a vehicle for a non-profit agency.
“We’ve done it all across campus … We have Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning (HVAC) students actually involved in habitat for humanity housing, so they often install ductwork or the heating system in the habitat homes,” he said.
During the fall semester, a developmental reading class was granted the opportunity to participate in a Service Learning project by writing and illustrating their own original books for the Early Childhood Education lab.
“I think we were all intrigued by the idea of doing it; getting out of class and helping out the little kids by making books for them,” Justice Thomas, a Nursing major who participated in the project said.
Most of the students said they created books that could teach the children something.
“Mine was about counting shapes. I was in [early childhood education] in high school, so I kind of knew what to do,” Randi Robinson, an Early Childhood Education major said.
Upon beginning the project, students searched through existing children’s books for inspiration, then they began to create their own. Another class then read the created books to the children in the lab. The project took a week to complete.
Overall, the students in the class said they felt good about participating in the project.
“It was just so much fun,” Donché Collins, an undecided major said. “I loved it.”
A computer engineering class also participated in a Service Learning project during the fall semester, by repairing computers that were kept in a warehouse that was owned by a retired Sinclair professor.
“It was a hands-on experience, repairing computers … I thought it was great, because we got to see a lot of things we didn’t see in [the classroom] it was definitely a good learning tool for me,” Eric York, an EETCET major, said.
The students said they saw the benefits in participating in the Service Learning project.
“It was a good experience, it was good to go out there and see the warehouse, make it our own workspace, try to fix things,” Brad Bateson, a ETC major said. “In the lab, it’s controlled; we already know everything we have. [In the warehouse], we were finding things we had never seen before. It was a really good team-building project too.”
The students agreed that what they learned in the classroom was reinforced by engaging the Service Learning project.
“It’s a strategy to use in teaching and learning that puts the students in an active learning mode,” Bodary said. “Highly engaged, highly involved learning, and it results in more memorable learning activities.”