The first article I read was Service-Learning: A Balanced Approach to Experiential Education by Andrew Fuoco. In it, he tries to explain what exactly is service learning and how it has changed over the years. He elaborates on the guidelines used to form service learning programs and on the different types of service learning programs.
The article is quite new to me as I have not read many aricles about service learning. As it is required for a USF student to take a class with a service learning requirement, it is enlightening to see what kinds of experiential learning programs are considered service learning. The many different forms that service learning takes is also new to me, because although I have heard and taken part in those programs before, I had not realised their similarities with service learning. His defintion of service learning as benefiting both community and student equally is accurate.
I agree with the explanations and classifications of service learning types. The five different program types explained in the article are volunteerism, community service, field education, internship and service learning. The simple figure in the book showing the focuses of each program between the service provided to the recipient and the knowledge gained by the provider. In essence, the graph is pretty accurate as to what the focuses of each program are. Volunteering is mostly for the benefit of the recipient, internship focuses on teaching with hands-on experience, and service learning aims for a balance between the two.
In the conlusion of the paper, Fuoco states that each and every service learning program can be mobile along the graph and the program could be leaning towards service or learning at any particular point in the program. I think this is particularly true, as there could be different activities or tasks in each program which may lean towards either end of the spectrum.
I cannot find a point in the article that I disagree with, as all of his classifications make sense and he is not trying to argue for or against Service Learning but simply defining and classifying it.
The second article in question is Why Service-Learning is Bad by John W. Eby. In this he describes the faults of current service learning programs and how they can actually do more harm than good. He also offer a solution to the problem and offers suggestions on how to improve the current service learning efforts.
Many of the points that Eby brings up in the article things that I haven't thought about as a participant of service learning. The raises the question that trying to help may not actually be helping, if you don't know what you're doing. As the saying goes, the worst results are often caused by the best of intentions.
I agree with Eby that the service-learning system has some flaws. The rise of service learning efforts and volunteerism, where people offer their services for free could actually be detrimental as volunteers may actually be taking jobs away from the people who really need it. If an organization could get people to come for free and volunteer their work without pay, they have no need to hire any people to do the same job. In a sense, volunteers take away jobs from the people who may be most in need of one.
Sometimes the motives and purposes of a service learning program may be catering to an academic institution or company instead of the recipients of the services performed. For example, I have taken part in a service-learning program where I joined a group that taught English to primary age schoolchildren in China. Although we worked hard to teach the children as much as we could with a specialized syllabus designed for short courses, we wondered how effective it actually is. Would any of the children we teach have a use for the rudimentary english that we teach them within the 3 short weeks we taught them? Are we really benefiting the children with this crash course syllabus? In the end, I was comforted by the knowledge that the students at least will get a head start in their primary school education in English.
But here is where I disagree with Eby. Although some service learning programs have these flaws, ultimately, the student and the community both gain from the interactions between them. Long term service learning programs, in particular, do not teach students to put band-aids on social problems, as the students are more commited to the problem are manage to see it more from many different sides and can actually see the reults of their effort. After all, if we cannot educate the young to be more socially aware of problems, who will?
In the end, as Eby says, service learning has the potential to do both great harm and good, as with most of our human inventions. The only thing to do is make sure that we continue to improve the structure of service learning to actually benefit both community and participant equally, as Fuoco says in his article.
