A Facebook repost says that the kind of teaching that schools give produces a “generation of kids with no concept of reality” that eventually “set them up for failure in the real world”.
This is the case when classroom instruction is so abstract that the concepts and theories taught are not grounded, and so when students graduate, they are more alienated and unable to adjust in the real world to become productive.
I agree with the subsequent Facebook comment that parents have a big role for teaching their children about the realities of life, and how to live with them.
But the school can also do it. Classroom instruction cannot remain as abstraction when a teacher employs service-learning strategy when feasible.
This pedagogy is partly similar with field exposure, on-the-job training, and internship, and also half akin to voluntary service, outreach, and extension work.
While the first set concerns more with learning of skills for passing marks, and the second set emphasizes more service for others without expectation of reward, service-learning combines them — equally learning of skills and valuing of service.
With service-learning, the students are prepared in school according to the contents of the syllabus before they are sent out to the community or an agency to serve for a given period applying what they learned.
They are graded not in terms of the impact they make on the community but based on their reflections of the lessons learned, and the values they had realized from the experiences of community engagement.
Therefore, the use of service-learning is planned and anchored on the principles of experiential learning.
According to Dr. Dan Butin, author of Service-Learning in Theory and Practice
(2010), what the students learn in their community engagement are technical, cultural, political, and anti-foundational.
Technical learning refers to the knowledge and skills acquired in school that are enhanced in the community; cultural learning includes the development of sense of civic responsibility and the recognition of the diversity of people and the complexity of life; political learning covers the sense of power of students to confront and negotiate authority in presenting issues and projects; and anti-foundational learning concerns with their capacity to contest underlying assumptions of truth or basic knowledge.
Simply put, community engagement through service-learning makes students not only receptacles of ideas, but they are active participants in knowledge production wherein they are able to find meanings to what they learned from textbooks and classroom lectures.
They confront social realities, as well as find the value of their future professions while still pursuing their career paths.
In fact, they may also realize to shift paths that have greater social relevance after being engaged with a community.
It was in 2001 that service-learning was first tried at Silliman University. Later, as part of its institutionalization, the Service-Learning Center was established, currently headed by Prof. Emervencia Ligutom.
The center does not only coordinate the service-learning activities of Silliman students and faculty, but also of international students coming from universities in Asia and the US that partnered with Silliman.
A special issue of the Silliman Journal (2002) documented the impact on and experiences of Silliman students and faculty in service-learning when it was newly practiced. My article in this issue, which quantitatively measures how students were benefited by service-learning, statistically shows that those who were better equipped inside the classroom were more able to render service to the community, who in turn, valued more the services they had rendered.
Correspondingly, those who had rendered more services admittedly learned more which they were able to link with classroom instruction.
It is also noteworthy to share some of the personal reflections of students. An anthropology student said that “it does not only make you visualize what other people’s lives look like but actually gives you a chance to come into contact with them first hand.” A business student wrote that it is “a rare opportunity… to help others who are in need (and) it taught me, made me understand, and even made me a better student in facing my own problems and trials.”
One faculty commented that service-learning provided students the opportunity to explain in their own terms what they saw and felt around. They became more confident to discuss with their teachers issues that they personally encountered in the field. But what is more inspiring is what one faculty said that service-learning is “a kind of education for the heart, of making students extra sensitive to the realities around them which they otherwise would not experience when they were only confined in the four walls of the classroom.”
Without a doubt, service-learning is responsive to the ideals of liberal arts education, of building total human capability for adapting to social realities and complexities in life.
