Early in my education career, I was entranced with the idea of establishing and developing my students' "soft skills". In particular, I wanted to develop their sense of empathy, self-respect, and respect for their surrounding environment. When I first came across the idea of service learning, I was buoyed when I heard it could help me achieve my stated goals, yet I was reticent to embrace what at the time was seen as a newfangled, crazy teaching technique. Upon trying it and earnestly immersing myself in the underpinning research, I learned of the myriad social-emotional and academic benefits of the practice and became an instant convert.
Why Choose Service Learning?
Service learning gives students opportunities to identify salient community problems and engage in real-world solutions to those problems. For students who see traditional school learning as meaningless banality, service learning opens up opportunities to immerse themselves in authentic learning experiences that allow for innovative expressions of knowledge. Service learning grants all students the chance to get outside conventional learning confines to explore the world around them, while providing them with a range of other interpersonal and intrapersonal benefits as well. Although there are numerous advantages to service learning, chief among them, in my experience, is the promotion of empathy.
Empathy is defined as a means to recognize and appreciate the feelings of others, the origins of these feelings, and the ability to engage in the emotional episodes of an individual while remaining apart from them (Keen, 2007). Service learning has been found to develop a student's overall empathetic agency (Wilson, 2011). Through their service learning placements, students learn more about the sensibilities of others. Through reflection and discussion, they develop an appreciation for the thoughts, feelings, and ideas expressed by others and can begin to put themselves in the position(s) of other people. To see this in practice, consider an easy-to-implement service project I facilitated for my 5th grade students.
Empathy in Elementary
On a weekly basis, my 5th graders would tutor and mentor 5- and 6-year-old students in our school's kindergarten. My students would read to and with the young students, help them with counting, and counsel them when conflicts arose. Initially, the sole purpose of this endeavor was to improve the rudimentary reading and math skills of the kindergarteners. However, as an unintended consequence of the interaction, my own students became better at understanding other people's struggles. 'After every session in the kindergarten classroom, I would have my students journal about their experiences using a guiding question. In their responses, students would make connections to their own experiences as struggling readers and mathematicians: "I remember thinking the word know was pronounced Ka-now, too." And, "I remember trying to count past five on my fingers. I could not do it because I only had five fingers on one hand." By reflecting on service learning, making these universal connections, and practicing taking on the disposition of empathetic mentor, students were better able to relate when their own peers faced academic challenges.
Next, in small groups, students shared their journal responses and, based on those responses, established goals for the next mentoring/tutoring session. Sometimes those goals would be academic focused and other times social-emotional in orientation. I would prompt students at this step by saying something such as, "Based on what I've heard, it sounds like we should focus on math tutoring next time. What do you all think?" Sometimes students would agree, but other times some would counter with evidence-based alternatives, like, "I think we should focus on mentoring because I had four students tell me they were being bullied. I used to get bullied in 3rd grade, so I know what that's like." Powerful contributions such as these prompted other students to begin internalizing and synthesizing their service learning experience with their own history, creating a genuine understanding of other people's experiences.
Among my many takeaways from these early experiences with service learning was that students appreciate the chance to drive their own learning and can truly develop powerful empathetic capacity because of these experiences. Over the course of this project, many of my students became more self-aware, more responsive to others' perspectives and needs, and more caring in their interactions with peers. Unquestionably, learning through service enabled my students to meaningfully construct and deepen their empathy.