When Martin Luther King was assassinated, the school year began with teachers on strike in New York City and Senator Eugene McCarthy challenging a sitting president; it ended with the deaths of Dr. King and Senator Robert Kennedy. I was working with an after school program in New York City’s South Jamaica Houses, and accepted an invitation to become a Peace Corp Volunteer teaching high school in Buchanan, Liberia, West Africa.
Twenty years later, in 1988, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute for Nonviolence, a state agency lead by Harry Belafonte under Governor Mario Cuomo, presented workshops throughout New York. The Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players hosted a series of these workshops at Liberty High School on West 18th Street in Manhattan. We also sponsored additional workshops down the street at the offices of the Superintendent of Alternative High Schools and Programs located in the Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities. The workshop leaders, who had worked with Dr. King in the sixties, explained how he acted as a catalyst to cause change in the communities he visited.
Too often education becomes a game for winners and losers. Tests award and fail students. But our society can accomodate all its members and find merit in each if teachers would pause to listen and respond to their students (who would learn to write better because their teachers were reading and responding to the student writing). We wanted to enable communication, a rare thing. The Waterways teachers who visited school sites thus also acted as catalysts by publishing students’ expressive writing and poetry that resulted from the classroom discussions and reflections of all students.
Administrators at the superintendency of New York City’s alternative high schools asked us to develop a service learning component for one of its programs, New York City Vocational Training Center (VTC). VTC had grown from a cohort of industries, hospitals, nursing homes, and unions that provided internships at their own locations for vocational and special education students aging out of the school system. VTC provided an academic component at each site for its students. The cooperating agencies facilitated job coached hands on training for the VTC students at their locations. Through the work of the licensed academic and vocational teachers and the mentors at the cohort of cooperating businesses, students were helped to gain a GED, IEP or High School diploma while at the same time learning job related skills that would help them gain employment after leaving VTC.
Ten Penny Players’ writing and peer publishing curriculum enabled all participating students to share their reflections through the expressive writing that we published . Regularly scheduled ‘reflection’ is an important component of Service Learning. VTC and all the Alternative schools and programs already practiced ‘reflection’ only it was called Family Group. In this regularly scheduled practice students reflected on their activities and the challenges faced daily in the work site or at home. Because reflection was already part of the VTC program we were able to acknowledge it as both an accepted Family Group practice and as a Service Learning component. What was familiar, also was new, and therefore possible to develop into a formal Service Learning curriculum that met both Department of Education and the Governor’s Service Learning criteria and standards and didn’t cause formal grievance from the teacher’s union, parents or students. A win win for everyone including Ten Penny Players as it enabled the students to write and be published as part of our program.
--by R. Spiegel & B. Fisher
Learn and Serve 2001 Celebration
http://www.scribd.com/collections/2665044/Service-Learning-Curriculum
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