#1-Understanding of Service-Learning

Question: Read the Jacoby Introduction to Service-Learning, Service Learning Essentials, and answer the following questions. 

1. 1. What is service-learning? What does it mean for different stakeholders? The community you are serving? The faculty teaching the course? The DSS program? And yourself?
   2. Time is very precious in our busy modern-day life. 
      Why are you devoting your precious time to community service?
      

Answer: According to what Barbara Jacoby mentioned in “Introduction to Service Learning”, 

“service-learning as a form of experiential education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs, together with structured opportunities for reflection designed to achieve desired learning outcomes (Jacoby, 1996c). The hyphen in service-learning symbolizes reflection and depicts the symbiotic relationship between service and learning.” Reflection and reciprocity are the two key elements that make service learning distinguished from other community services. Reflection stands for reviewing and evaluating your own work during the whole service process and learn from that, no matter whether it is something that you achieved or expected to achieve in the future.

Speaking of its significance for different stakeholders in service-learning, for the community we will be serving, it means that they are going to share some of their stories with us and exchange them for something that we create for them. As for the faculty teaching this course, I guess it means to be a leader, or to say a facilitator, to encourage all the students to get themselves involved in the service-learning and actively reflect on themselves so as to learn from the experience. Also, the faculty can also learn from what every student observe and learn from their own experience and possibly combine all of those together to make some more impactful actions to the whole society. For the DSS program, I think it is a good chance to maintain sustainable cooperating relationships with the local community. And last but not least, as for myself, I believe it will be a great chance for me to learn from others, the faculty that we are going to know about, the teammates who will be doing different projects but aiming to the same goal with me, and of course, the professor who know much more than me. Mutually, this will be a hard-won chance to apply what I learn from the classroom to practice and really help someone around us. I think this is really fascinating.

Indeed, time is very precious in our busy modern daily life. But that is exactly where my reason for choosing to devote myself to service-learning lies. Time is precious, not only for me but also for millions of people similar to me. All of us are working hard, busy commuting, and dealing with annoying projects. However, I wonder, if I can use some of my precious time to develop or design something that can help relieve others’ stress in their daily life, or even improve their productivity so as to save their time, I think in that way the time I spent will be much more meaningful.