Research Matters

Many people are attracted to service-learning because they see what it does for students, schools, and communities. Students are more engaged in their studies, schools are revitalized, with a new sense of mission and focus, and community members, energized by working with students on service-learning projects, are more supportive of young people and their schools. This rosy picture is the reality in some settings with well-implemented service-learning, but too often this is not the case. In fact, much service-learning practice is uneven in quality, and research shows that low-quality service-learning has little impact

Learning That Matters

In Georgia, kindergarten and first-grade students conduct a community mapping activity to figure out the needs of the children within the school. Kindergartners new to the school say that the school layout is confusing and it is hard to find their way to the classrooms. Each class considers solutions, and students decide to label the hallways with street signs. Each class brainstorms potential names for the hallways, and first grade students design and conduct a survey. They eliminate names that do not represent positive images. (No Shock Street because it would scare the five-year-olds.) The surveys are administered, the data are entered into a spreadsheet on the computer, and the students review the street names with the highest votes and allocate them to particular hallways. They then grapple with the question of whether the signs they make to identify the halls should be permanent or whether students each year should have the chance to name the halls so they feel more ownership of the school. They decide to poll all of the students, graph the results, and decide based on majority rule. While reviewing the polls, they decide whether bar graphs, line graphs, or pie graphs are the best way to present the data to other students so that everyone can understand the results

Service and Service-Learning in International Baccalaureate High Schools: An International Comparison of Outcomes and Moderators

The International Baccalaureate (IB) Organization asks high school students in its Diploma Programme to engage in service as a way to become more civic-minded, develop leadership and other skills, and develop an ethic of service. The study discussed is this article investigated the ways in which IB students in Canada, the United States, and Central and South America provided service, and the self-perceived outcomes of their participation. The study also examined the extent to which program design characteristics influenced perceived outcomes, demonstrating the strong effect sizes associated with students’ reports of meaningfulness, links to curriculum, student voice, and frequency and depth of reflection. The study was limited by student self-reporting but was suggestive of hypotheses that can be investigated further

Executive Summary - The Philadelphia Freedom Schools Junior Leader Project

The Philadelphia Freedom Schools Junior Leader Project is a bold initiative to foster leadership and civic engagement for young people in the Philadelphia School District. Beginning in 1999, the school district project was developed to help young African American and other high school students to become strong leaders in their schools and communities. The Junior Leader project recruited freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in high school to learn about their heritage; work with young children to help them gain academic skills; participate in meaningful dialogue about social justice; learn and engage in community action strategies; develop leadership skills; and create pathways for leading enriched, healthy lives and contribute to the community and society at large. This evaluation report presents the results of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools Project for the period from April2001 to June 2002

The Effects of Service Learning

Research, while limited, finds that students who help others help themselves academically and socially

The Impacts of Service Learning on Youth, Schools and Communities: Research on K-12 School-Based Service Learning, 1990 to 1999

This is an excellent review of literature on the outcomes of service-learning for all involved by a respected author. Contents: Prevalence of Service Learning I Rationale for Use in K-12 Public Schools I Evidence of Impact /Impact on Personal and Social Development /Impact on Civic Responsibility /Impact on Student Academic Learning /Impact on Career Exploration and Aspirations /Impact on Schools /Impact on Communities. Includes five-page bibliography of all sources cited

Jekyll and Hyde: men's constructions of feminism and feminists

Research and commentary on men's responses to feminism has demonstrated the range of ways in which men have mobilised both against and for feminist principles. This paper argues that further analyses of men's responses require a sophisticated theory of discourse acknowledging the fragmented and contradictory nature of representation. A corpus of men's talk on feminism and feminists was studied to identify the pervasive patterns in men's accounting and regularities in rhetorical organisation. Material from two samples of men was included: a sample of white middle-class 17-18 year old school students and a sample of 60 interviews with a more diverse sample of older men aged 20 to 64. Two interpretative repertoires of feminism and feminists were identified. These set up a 'Jekyll and Hyde' binary and positioned feminism along with feminists very differently as reasonable versus extreme and monstrous. Both repertoires tended to be deployed together and the paper explores the ideological and interactional consequences of typical deployments along with the identity work accomplished by the men as they positioned themselves in relation to these

Never the twain shall meet: a critical appraisal of the combination of discourse and psychoanalytic theory in studies of men and masculinity

In recent years there has been a number of attempts by different researchers to study men and masculinity using a combination of discourse theory and psychoanalysis. The main reason for this development is the sense that, on its own, discourse theory provides an incomplete account of masculine subjectivity. Psychoanalysis is thought to be able to fill those gaps. In this paper I want to begin by reviewing these arguments. I will provide an outline of the alleged deficiencies in discursive approaches to men and masculinity before going on to examine some of the work that has attempted the above synthesis. What I aim to show is that, for a number of reasons, such attempts are bound to fail. Instead, I will argue that better progress can be made in studies of masculinity by remaining within the theoretical boundaries of Discursive Psychology