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The Community Service Link: A
Response to the Ten Principles of Learning |
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The Community Service Link: A
Response to the Ten Principles of Learning |
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© Copyright 1999 by Ruth Overman Fischer (rfischer@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author. |
Section 7: The Principle of
Connectedness
Learning is fundamentally about making and maintaining connections: biologically through neural networks; mentally among concepts, ideas, and meanings; and experientially through interaction between the mind and the environment, self and other, generality and content, deliberation and action. Through the Community Service Link, we tried to provide a plethora of opportunities for connectedness to occur. The concepts and ideas presented in SOCI 101 formed the basis for class discussion not only in SOCI 101 but also in the Reflection/Analysis section of the field notes. I enhanced these connections in ENGL 101 through close readings of the texts which presented these ideas/concepts along with helping students connect these ideas/concepts and students' emerging awareness of themselves as learners/thinkers/writers. The experiential component of their community service was foundational to their interaction between deliberation and action. Students had to make on-the-spot decisions about how to best work with a particular child. Hanna noticed a connection between gender as a sociological construct and gender in action: Society has taught girls to play with only 'girl' toys and boys to play with only 'boy' toys. The separation of toys [has] made boys and girls separate and play with their own gender. At Clara Barton I noticed an incident of gender division. On October 23, I went to the library with a group of students for a multiplication bee. Another Mason volunteer divided the students into boy and girl teams and the students seemed to like the idea. The thing that surprised me most was that fact that an adult volunteer was the one who did the dividing, not the students. I always thought that adults were supposed to enforce equality and teach children to work together not matter what ethnicity or gender, but I guess the volunteer hadn't paid attention to the issue [when we discussed it in class]. Retta took personal responsibility for challenging students to a higher level of difficulty. In doing so, she demonstrated a connection between mind and environment. Having observed how well her students had done on the teacher-generated assignment, she capitalized on that success by moving students to a more difficult activity on her own. In the [3rd grade] math group today, I was surprised how quickly the girls I worked with went through the level one cards [that the teacher had told me to use]. I asked them if they wanted to try harder cards and they eagerly said 'yes.' That made me feel like I was doing my job well. They had a little trouble with three numbers but I gave them hints and they did much better. Next Section: "The Principle of a Compelling Situation" Previous Section: "The Community Service Link within the Ten Principles" |