Local Global Connection Through Service Learning

Integrating Service Learning into Your Curriculum by Making the

Local Global Connection

March 27, 2009Presented by

Fungai Kanogoiwa

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Making the Local-Global Connection through Curriculum-Integrated Service Learning

What does this mean?

And why should you incorporate this concept into your classes you teach?

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The Problem Defined

• You are a far-sighted teacher or school administrator. You want to introduce service learning into your traditional curriculum

• Problem: Your colleagues don’t fully get it. What do you do?

• Here are some tips on what to do, along with selections of suggested material that you could actually use as a template for creating a curriculum-integrated service learning program in your school

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What is Service Learning, and What are its Goals?• First, what Service Learning is not:

• It is not just an extracurricular afterthought, or a trendy “add-on” during one’s college or high school years—to be conveniently forgotten once your students enter the “real” world

• It is not a mere resume builder designed to make them look good as they try to get to the next level in life

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Service Learning is …• An activity that will change both your students as well as

those they will be serving• An involvement that will help prepare them to become well-

rounded decision-makers capable of working across cultural lines

• An engagement that will enable them to develop a sense of global citizenship which will serve them as a lifelong compass

• A tool that will equip them to lead not just from the top-down but from the bottom up, in whatever area of public life they enter

• An experience that will help them see the world in characteristically global ways, yet think and act locally

• An involvement that should alter them enough that it becomes a permanent part of their knowledge base—indeed, of their very selves—the rest of their lives

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Tips: What To Do• One: Develop and position your material so

it helps your students to make the local-global connection. Why, and what’s that?

• You need to put service learning in a larger picture that connects what is going on in their local neighborhood with what is occurring globally. In give local action a global significance.

• Second, it helps them to see that what they choose to do or don’t do has far-reaching effects.

• Similarly, choices made on the other side of the world affect us here

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• The next set of slides discuss how to organize Community Service Learning around a theme in your school curriculum

• For example: studying soil in AP Biology, or water in Geography, or poverty in Social Studies.

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What are the Takeaways?• First, service learning offers students priceless

lessons that no textbook could ever teach them. Example: that the world’s resource management problems, while large, are not insurmountable

• Second, your students will learn, in practical vivid ways, that local-global resource problems like soil degradation, are avoidable, but tackling them requires working simultaneously on several fronts, because these fronts are interlinked and intertwined

• This is what is going to help them 15 years from now, when they are junior policymakers or company executives

• Globalize their minds now, and you set them for life

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Curriculum integrationSubject: Biology

Topic: The physical environment

Sub-topic: Soil

(Alternative subjects: Social Studies and

Geography) The Strategy:While using your existing science syllabus, you can extend your lessons beyond the classroom by linking the subject to broader issues occurring either in the United States or the rest of the world

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Example: After studying soil, lead a discussion on the impact of soil on our day-to-day lives. We are facing a major dilemma as the world continues to lose its soil at an alarming rate.

The food they ate in the cafeteria most likely partly came from soil that is being threatened with depletion, erosion and compaction—often not far from where the students live.

The idea is get students to start looking at soil as something other than DIRT. It is a life source.

Encourage your students to research hardy crops that be grown in relatively poor soil, without the use of chemicals or fertilizers.

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Project-linked activitiesThey could identify farming methods that improve soil condition. For example, crop rotation.

Soil Fertility: How to increase soil fertility be increased without artificial fertilizers

Soil management: Study soil erosion --- how to reduce soil erosion

Some countries, like Haiti, have just about completely lost their soil.

Result: They can hardly feed themselves today.

Question: What policy interventions should the rest of the rich world adopt to try to help them restore their soil?

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Soil: Making the Local-Global Connection  Question: Why is soil erosion both a local and a

global issue? Fact: The whole world depends on soil. And

agricultural trade links us even further. Rich and poor countries alike are engaging in

practices that are accelerating soil degradation In the US, for example, the use of heavy farm

machinery compacts the soil, essentially crushing its micro-structure and make it less and less usable.

In other countries, lack of food leads to overgrazing. Lack of crop rotation and global warming add to soil degradation

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In just the past four decades, soil erosion has destroyed almost one-third of all the fertile land in the world.

When soil is destroyed, forests disappear. From the Amazon to Indonesia to East Africa, rain forests and farmland are disappearing at an alarming rate

What responses can your students formulate to these soil-related issues?

Lead them in a role-play simulating a debate in the House of Congress about US farming practices, or a session in the United Nations on the future of the global environment

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A Vicious Cycle of Interconnected Events Carbon emissions in the West and in China create

global warming through greenhouse effects ... which leads to climate change … which triggers severe droughts, floods, and

mudslides ... which in turn cause soil erosion … which leads to over-cultivation of existing

farmland … which hastens soil degradation by exhausting the

nutrient-rich soil … which results in declining harvests and food

shortages

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Further Sobering Facts Ecologists say 10 percent of a country’s

terrain should be covered by forest. But in most countries, the forest cover is now less than two percent.

Many of us may not be feeling it now, but the world is losing its ability to feed itself—through erosion, soil degradation, deforestation, desertification, and drought driven by climate change.

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“With eight billion people, we're going to have to start getting interested in soil. We’re simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt.”

Geologist and author David R. Montgomery, in Charles C. Mann, “Our Good Earth,” National Geographic, September 2008

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Haiti: Many countries have lost their soil and thus the means to feed themselves.Source: National Geographic Magazine September 2008

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Service Learning: Food Security

We can all relate to food. So food security presents powerful lessons that make it an ideal Service Learning local-global theme illustrating the centrality of soil and its role in life.

Take your students on a trip to visit and work a large agribusiness farm to understand the impact of big machinery, and how it is compacting and degrading the soil beneath our feet.

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A greenhouse

Source: Sakario, Flickr

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Strategic Learning Goals The aim is to connect textbook learning to the real world

Evidence shows that the most effective learning occurs when students draw on all their faculties to interact concretely with their surroundings— rural or urban, local or abroad—while engaging farmer, immigrant workers, and other local stakeholders in active conversation

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The Educational BenefitsA farm visit will give your students opportunities to use their analytical and conversational skills in real-life situations that extend beyond the walls of their classroom, and into the community

Second, it will foster a sense of caring for others and for the globe as they engage in trench digging, bed preparation, planting of seedlings, and cultivation of nurseries

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A group of high school students on a trip to work on an organic farm in Tacoma, WashingtonSource: Voluntourists, Flickr

“We both did the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Montana the year after we graduated from St. Joe's. Kristen worked part-time at the Missoula Food Bank and part-time with the children's program at the YWCA shelter. Mary worked as a case manager at the YWCA shelter.” Source: Voluntourists, Flickr

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The Policy Angle: How and Why Do Policies Go Wrong? Face it. Most urban students are not going to

grow up to be farmers or even soil scientists. Their point of contact with soil issues is likely

to occur from decision-making positions as policymakers, government workers, company managers, and voters

Result: It’s important to get them to think from the policy angle

They need to understand why policies go wrong, and why wrong policies are made in the first place. So…

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Wrong-headed Policies: How Can the World Fix Them? What policies can be put in place to ban or

reduce the use of pesticides or fertilizers that making soil toxic?

Since the Kyoto Environmental Agreement failed, what policies can be into place to curb the negative effects of climate change which are damaging the soil and leading to low crop yields and soil erosion?

Many commercial farmers in developed countries use heavy machinery because they say they can’t afford the costs of hiring a lot of workers to do what one big combine harvester can do. So they’d rather damage the soil. Who is right?

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The Policy Angle, continued• Question: Should governments offer

incentives that bring in more seasonal migrants to work on farms, thus encouraging big-business farmers to use more labor and less machinery?

• Who are the world’s biggest polluters of air, soil and water?

• If you were in the Senate or at the UN, what policies would you try to introduce to discourage or penalize major polluters?

• Which do you think works better: Penalties, or education?

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OUTCOMES: What Can You Expect from a Well-Designed, Curriculum-Linked Service Learning Program? You should be able to teach your students to…

• Think and act both globally and locally

• Develop a working vocabulary around global issues, and place service learning in an expanded conceptual framework that makes sense of both local and world events

• Make the global-local connection and grasp how global developments affect us here, and vice versa

• See themselves as transformative agents beginning to nurture a commitment to global advocacy

• Start to prepare themselves to become well-rounded, far-sighted decision makers capable of working across cultural lines

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OUTCOMES: What Can You Expect from a Well-Designed Service Learning Program? Continued

You should be able to teach your students to…

• Select local community service projects and understand how they link to global issues

• Gain an understanding of global issues that goes beyond conventional isolated initiatives

• Understand specific world regions, the economic, justice and environment challenges they face, and the forces that affect their life choices and outcomes

• Build an information and support network with other student allies at other schools, and with NGOs that are committed to local-global issues through service learning