Special Projects for Special People: Students with Disabilities Serve Others through Service-Learning Projects
As I browsed through many of the Service Learning Projects on (http://www.servicelearning.org/), the project above stood out more than others. The organizer, Lisa Olnes, teaches a 6th grade class that includes 5 disabled students. They all have a specific condition, but they all have a learning disability. She points out that at the beginning of the semester, they suffered from a severe lack of confidence in their knowledge and abilities, and did not see a connection between the real-world and what they learn in class. She believed that getting her students involved in service learning was a way to change all of that, and help their community all at the same time.
This stood out to me because the class was divided into different groups. Each group preformed a different service project. These varied from writing letters to U.S. soldiers in Iraq, adopting a grandparent, a pet food drive at the animal shelter, and bake sales/food drives for the homeless. She monitored the disabled students' progress and noted their improvements.
The benefits for this Service Learning are many. The most important benefit is what the students are able to accomplish in their own community. They make a difference by assisting the elderly or by providing food to a local homeless shelter. The great thing about this service learning project is that these benefits are byproducts. The true benefit is for the students, specifically, those in the classroom who are disabled. Many of them suffer from speech impairment. By getting involved, they are able to move beyond it and gain confidence that they would have otherwise lacked. According to Lisa Olnes, "As a result of the service learning projects, my students displayed increased motivation, showed they cared for each other, were eager to help, made connections of what they were learning in school to the real world, and improved their social skills and self-confidence. The projects benefitted everyone involved, including all the students as they realized that they have something to give."
The best practices and methods associated with this lesson plan are similar to what is listed on the inquiry-based learning research we conducted as a class. Students learn the value of working together to achieve a goal that benefits the community. When they report their monthly progress to the instructor, they are proud of the work they have done and are eager to continue doing it. Above all, the students that previously failed to see a connection between the classroom and the outside world had changed after doing the Service Learning Project. Everything they worked for had a real-life, tangible result.
The main challenge the author faced was that they were not able to implement all the service learning projects due to time constraints. That isn't a very bad thing, because the students will just have to choose wisely on what project they would like. The fact that they do have a choice will allow them a more personal connection to the work they are doing.
~MjG
Olnes, L. (2008). Special projects for special people: Students with disabilities serve othersthrough service-learning projects. TEACHING Exceptional Children Plus, 5(2) Article 4. Retrieved[9/27/2009] from http://escholarship.bc.edu/education/tecplus/vol5/iss2/art4
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This is really interesting because some of the students with disabilities might have some people wanting to volunteer to help them, so this turns the tables a bit. I wonder how many kids like this sort of get categorized as helpless or even if their teachers let them squeak by instead of achieving their best because the teachers feel bad for them or don't recognize their potential. Like the author, I was a bit worried about time and other constraints for a lot of the lessons I looked for. Writing letters and having food drives though seem really feasible and they shouldn't really have to leave their classrooms.
ReplyDeleteI definitely like the idea of empowering disabled students because I was always raised to believe that people aren't disable or handicapped, they just have to go about things differently than I do, but they are more than capable of being contributing members of a classroom and society. The fact that students are doing different service larning projects is able to expose students to a variety of ways they can help out their community. You can survey students to try and put them in a service learning group that they haven't experienced yet and then have each group share their experiences with the rest of the class. This can peak interest in other service learning projects and hopefully students will want to try a variety of things on their own.
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