Monthly Archives: November 2012

service-learning tips for elementary school teachers

I’m going to meet today with the faculty of an urban k-8 school that has adopted service-learning as a pervasive strategy. I’ve personally conducted service-learning with high school and college students and have helped study the effects of service-learning on adolescents. My experience with the early grades is much more limited. However, CIRCLE recently evaluated a Massachusetts 8th-grade program called “Green in the Middle,” which encourages environmental service projects; we found good effects on the students’ academic performance and motivations. Examples of their projects:

  • Kids studied the science of composting and began composting cafeteria waste in their school (see the curriculum with links to appropriate science standards);
  • Kids studied the effects of Styrofoam on their environment and made a PowerPoint for the school administration to advocate for using alternative materials in the cafeteria
  • Kids grew vegetables on the school grounds, made them into healthy cooked food, and gave the food to families.

I am also involved in a voluntary multi-state effort to revise social studies standards for grades k-12. Our job is not to write service-learning standards, but we are thinking about what kids should learn in the early grades about society, citizenship, and communities. Service-learning may be one way to attain some of those goals.

Here are some points that I am thinking of making:

Service-learning means collaborative work of public value combined with academic learning.

Service-learning should benefit a community, but the community need not be outside the school. It can be the classroom or the school itself.

Service-learning must involve actual work and must produce public goods–but “work” and “goods” can be defined broadly. Digging in a garden is one kind of work; critically analyzing a state law is another. If an individual student writes an analysis for the teacher’s eyes alone, that is not service-learning, but if students pool their knowledge and publish their analysis on a public website, that is service.

The concept of “service” is attractive and even compelling to many people, who think that we should serve others more than we do. It is intrinsic to the Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, among others. But it can also be problematic in several respects. It can imply that some people are privileged and have an obligation to serve other people. In almost any circumstance, that implies an inappropriate and inaccurate distinction between the people with assets and responsibilities and the others, who mainly have needs. That distinction would be particularly problematic in a school like the one I will visit this afternoon, which is genuinely diverse socioeconomically and where people are fairly conscious of disparities within the student body. We do not want students to conclude that some families need service and others ought to serve.

Another problem is that “service” can seem un-serious: not real academic work, and not like what adults are paid to do. For these reasons, I actually prefer the concept of public work to service-learning, but the phrase “service-learning” is well established and can support excellent teaching if properly understood.

There is evidence that service-learning is good pedagogy. It is motivating, because students tackle real problems. It is intellectually challenging. Students investigate ideas and information not to fulfill apparently arbitrary requirements from the teacher or the state, but in order to solve problems that seem important to them–which is how adults use their brains. It requires collaboration and discussion, which are essential skills for the 21st-century workplace. And it integrates ethical reflection with intellectual work.

But service-learning is not automatically or consistently effective. The quality and impact vary greatly. Sometimes the academic element is weak. Sometimes the students do not really serve their community. Very often, even in excellent programs, the students fail to solve social problems and may lose a sense of confidence and motivation. This is such a frequent problem that I think it is the great dilemma for our field. The more we encourage kids to tackle problems that feel important and authentic to them, the more we set them up to fail.

Sometimes, teachers try to maximize student voice. They gather the class and say (in effect), “Kids, we are going to do service-learning. It’s up to you to decide what issues to address, develop a plan, and execute it during this year (or during this month).” No wonder the students fail. That is not how adults do civic work. Adults citizens rarely start from scratch, and we don’t impose arbitrary deadlines on ourselves. Instead, we almost always enter ongoing projects and organizations. We may adjust the current course; we do not invent it.

By the way, the burden on teachers is also unreasonable if they must develop a new curriculum every year to match the students’ chosen service project.

I think students–most especially at the early grades–are best served by ongoing service-learning projects. They should be told (in effect), “We have a community garden at this school. It has been designed and built by students to serve environmental and social needs. It already works, but it needs your help and your ideas. You won’t solve social problems like hunger and global warming, but you will contribute.” Over time, if a school builds up a series of such projects, it can begin to offer students attractive choices while also making a real difference in the community.

the battle within the GOP

On Sept. 20, I told Lee-Anne Goodman of the Canadian Press (the national wire service of Canada):

“Trying to interpret why a party lost a campaign is always a blood sport, in every country, and anyone pushing an ideological agenda will say it’s because the candidate failed to embrace that agenda,” says Peter Levine. …

“But this time it’s all complicated by the fact that Romney is a such Rorschach blot of a candidate — he used to be pretty liberal, then he was very conservative in the primaries, and now he’s not specific about anything, so that will just add to the ambiguity if Republicans have to figure out what went wrong. …

“There will be at least two years, if not four, of bloody battle over what the election meant if they lose,” he said.

I still agree with the above, which seems pertinent right now. I am not sure if the following prediction of mine remains plausible:

“But I don’t think the traditional, moderate Republicans are going to keep quiet any longer. They may not have wanted to provoke any fights during primary season, when a presidency was within reach, but they’re anxious about what’s happening to the party, and if Romney loses, you’ll see organized efforts to take back control.”

That’s bad news for Democrats, he added.

“Democrats will be much better off if conservatives get their way, but my best guess is the Republican party will nominate a much more moderate candidate in 2016, thanks in large part to what’s happened in 2012.”

Right now, it’s not hard to find denialism about the election results and a continued desire to demonize the president. I was a guest on conservative talk radio in Philadelphia last week, and that’s where I first heard that the whole Petraeus sex scandal is actually a cover to prevent congressional investigations into Benghazi. On the other hand, you also see Republicans like Ross Douthat and Trey Grayson starting to push back. Up until now, one of their biggest problems has been differentiating themselves from Barack Obama. After all, imagine that a moderate Republican had been elected in 2008: what would she or he have done? I would guess: 1) stimulate the economy through a mix of temporary tax cuts and spending increases, Keynesian-style, and 2)  reform health care to universalize coverage and cut costs by requiring people to buy private health insurance, while subsidizing that cost for low-income people. This is exactly what Obama did.

That point is usually made by liberals who are dissatisfied with Obama’s moderation, but I think the president’s strategy had achieved liberal ends better than his two Democratic predecessors, Carter and Clinton, combined. So I applaud his record, but it still poses a challenge for moderate Republicans, who can’t be seen to occupy the same space. That challenge will become less problematic for them as the years pass, the Affordable Health Care Act becomes popular (but needs tweaks), and the country moves on to new issues, including immigration and the environment.

the Netter Center for Community Partnerships

(Philadelphia, PA) I am at the University of Pennsylvania along with about 500 colleagues who have come here to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships. The Netter Center connects an Ivy League University to the civic life and social problems of a great but distressed American city. The Netter Center encourages and supports research and service-learning, known at Penn as “Academically Based Community Service.” At the heart of its work are about 60 courses each year (enrolling a total of about 1,700 students) that address social problems in West Philadelphia. These separate courses contribute to a coordinated approach that Penn develops and refines in collaboration with the community. The Center was founded in 1992, near the start of the current movement for community-university partnerships and civic engagement in higher education. It has always set the standard.

Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall

Spring and Fall
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Synopsis: The speaker observes, imagines, remembers, or actually addresses a young girl who is sad to see leaves falling off trees. He tells her that as she grows older, she will no longer care for falling leaves but will still “weep and know why.” The underlying reason will be the same; it was always “Margaret [she] mourn[ed] for.”

Some contested or open questions:

1) What does the last line mean? Perhaps the adult Margaret mourns because she sees that her heart has hardened and she no longer mourns the falling leaves. Or perhaps she was sorrowful as a child for a reason that she only understands later: the autumn leaves were evidence of mortality, and so she has always wept for the same cause, her own fragility and death.

2) Who and where is the speaker? Is he (or she) talking to the little girl? To the adult Margaret? Just to us, and Margaret is a memory or fantasy? Is the speaker the ghost in line 13? Could the speaker be the older Margaret?

Form: With 15 rhymed lines, this is like a sonnet in which one pivotal couplet has been turned into a tercet. But it is an unusual sonnet because Hopkins imitates old English poetry. Two clues are the alliteration and the invented words with Anglo-Saxon ring, like “wanwood leafmeal.” More pervasively, Hopkins uses “sprung rhythms”–the form that is common to Anglo-Saxon poetry, nursery rhymes, and rap. In conventional English verse since the Renaissance, the lines have regular numbers of syllables, but the number and pattern of stresses is varied. In sprung rhythms, on the other hand, each line has the same number of stresses and takes the same amount of time to speak, but the number of syllables is varied. (E.g., each line of this nursery rhyme consumes the same amount of time and has three accented beats: “Hickory dickory dock / The mouse ran up the clock / The clock struck one / And down he run / Hickory dickory dock”). Hopkins starts this poem with couplets of one sentence each that alternate regularly between seven and eight syllables, but then he moves to pure sprung rhythm at the end.

Specific notes:

“gríeving / Over”: the usual preposition would be “for,” but “over” is appropriate for grief over a dead body, as at a wake.

“unleaving”: an Anglo-Saxonish coinage, and also a pun. The trees are unleaving as a person undresses–shedding their leaves. Also, the Goldengrove is not leaving: it is unchanging. Does that mean that the essence of the wood remains even as the leaves fall? Or that the girl’s sad experience in Goldengrove is permanent?

Line 3-4, in paraphrase: Because you are young and naive, you can care for leaves and the “things of man.”

“Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”: I read this as: “even though years of leaves have piled up as dirt (leafmeal).” The implied comparison is to generations of people piling up as dead. I have seen notes, however, in which “leafmeal” is read more as verb: a tree “leafs” by losing its leaves. “Wan” seems to mean “pale,” which could be odd for an autumn wood, but áwannian is Anglo-Saxon for “to become livid or black.” And ámeallod is “to be emptied out.”

“And yet you will weep and know why”: But the question is exactly why will she weep. For her growing callousness? For her mortality?

“Sórrow’s spríngs are the same”: An important pun. “Springs” means origins, and the origins of her sorrow are loss and death. “Springs” are also the antidotes to autumns, as implied by the title. Margaret is in the springtime of her life. The trees will “leaf” again and new Margarets will be born. (Alexandra Keegan sees a reference to the Book of Job: “For sorrow cometh not forth from the dust, Nor from the ground springeth up misery.”)

“Nor mouth had …” Now the rhythm and syntax are getting tangled, agitated, difficult, reflecting the speaker’s state of mind. This sentence could be paraphrased as: “The heart and spirit already guessed the truth that was not yet explicit in the child’s mind or speech.” But Hopkins turns that idea upside-down and begins with the negatives, “Nor … no nor …”

“Ghost” could mean “spirit,” in contrast to reason or articulate thought. (Hopkins, a Catholic priest, would use “ghost” as in the phrase “Holy Ghost.”) But the word also makes one wonder about the speaker. He or she is a ghostly presence observing the little girl. In fact, the speaker could be Margaret, much later in life or after death.

“The blight man was born for”: vulnerability to loss? Growing callousness? Dying like a falling leaf?

For comparison: my own sonnet to Hopkins (inspired by “Spring and Fall”) and my notes to Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” which is also about mortality.

the youth vote in the media

I think the press has been doing a good job covering the youth vote. That is by no means guaranteed. In 2004, youth turnout rose, but the dominant storyline held that youth voting had declined. The narrow reason for this error was a confusion between the share of the vote and the turnout rate, which are different statistics. The bigger reason was a need to explain why Bush won. It was too complicated to say that youth voted for Kerry but were simply outnumbered in the population. Instead, reporters went straight to the assumption that youth didn’t vote.

This time, I count 95 separate news articles (since Oct. 19) that cite CIRCLE. That is by no means a complete count of youth voting articles–reporters are free to write about youth without citing us–but I receive lists of stories that name us, and that is my sample.

Before Election Day, most articles were about the likely decline of youth turnout. That was a mistaken premise but not one that I challenged directly, because I also suspected turnout would fall. I only suggested that we should be hesitant to predict turnout based on very scanty polling evidence. Not because of me, but to their credit, most reporters hedged their predictions of decline. For instance, Tony Pugh wrote a McClatchy wire service story that began:

The love affair between young voters and President Barack Obama that ignited his candidacy in 2008 and powered him to the White House seems like a distant memory in 2012.

As Election Day approaches, there’s an enthusiasm gap among young voters.

But he also quoted our friend Rob “Biko” Baker of the League of Young Voters on efforts to rekindle enthusiasm.

Since Election Night, the vast majorities of stories have been about youth as an essential part of Obama’s winning coalition, and how Republicans are in trouble if they don’t try to build a younger and more diverse constituency. As I told the Inquirer newspapers, “It is because [Mitt Romney] lost the youth vote pretty decisively in all those battleground states that he is not going to be the next president of the United States.”

I am amused by the cliche of the “new normal”:

“In 2012, communities of color, young people and women are not merely interest groups, they’re the ‘new normal’ demographic of the American electorate,” said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza. …

I also used the cliche, as in USA Today:

CIRCLE director Peter Levine said turnout for young voters has increased over the last three elections – averaging what he called a “new normal” of about 50 percent – and making the once not-so-reliable voting segment now an “essential political bloc.”

Two especially insightful and heavily researched pieces are by Rebecca Rosen in the Atlantic, on the effect of social media, and by Reid Cherlin in GQ on the Obama campaign’s outreach strategies.

Finally, here I am on Huffington Post live, talking about how the GOP lost the youth vote: