I would consider service learning is a balance of academic learning and service where the intention is to provide service to others while learning skills throughout the process. Even in the case that skills aren’t learned, the reflection of the service could cause learning for the individual which is an important factor that differentiates service learning from volunteering or community service. In a sense, there’s sort of a reciprocal relation between the student and the recipient of service where they serve but are also served the experience of learning. This essentially means that I commit myself to providing a service for the recipient, being the people of Weifang Residence mentioned in class, where I am in a communicative relationship with them. I am to understand their needs and provide a service such as a creation of a product that can be of use to them. As for the relationship of faculty to service learning, they are more of the facilitators that provide the students the learning for creating the service while the DSS program is more of a support system that can interconnect the service provider and the service recipient.
I feel that a simple reason for devoting my time is that I want to learn how to serve others and try to create change within the community that I live in. Being a design student, the initial purpose of design is to help make people’s lives easier, better, or stimulate people’s thinking. Due to this, I should focus on the people for designing which is a major part of this course. Moreover, this course also goes over sustainable design, recycling and design as a whole. This is a major interest of mine to learn sustainable design process which would be a service to the community ecologically if I practice green design more in the future. The last reason that I want to devote my time to community service is that it’s much more directed to helping others rather than providing a service to others. What I mean by this is that the type of service delivered is one of aid rather than previous experiences of mine being the type of consumerist service.
Leave a Reply