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This issue sponsored by:
Feature Stories
You've Been Served | To Serve is to Learn
Rural Youth Impact Communities Through Living to Serve Grants
FFA Chapters Turn Community Service into a Habit of the Heart
You've Been Served!
Can you remember the very first time you helped someone in your community? I can… barely. I was 10 years old and our fifth grade choir teacher drove us to a local nursing home to sing Christmas carols and to help spruce up the home’s public rooms. Back in the day, we didn’t call our act of kindness community service or have another fancy name for it. We simply wanted to help. And for a few hours, we did. But then we climbed back on the bus and returned to school. School life went back to diagramming sentences, multiplying fractions and doing homework. The experience, while exciting “in the moment” didn’t stick with me nor did it inspire my young mind to think of more ways to help others. Even a few years later in high school, I can’t remember a single instance of helping others that extended beyond the “moment.”
So many times in our lives, we operate in “snippets of time” but we don’t take time to connect those snippets. I’ve worked at the National FFA Organization for three years now and am constantly amazed at how our members connect their service experiences with their classroom skills as well as their FFA activities and turn them into meaningful moments that follow them for the rest of their lives. It’s so important. So that’s why we’re devoting our November issue of Making a Difference to helping everyone connect with service-learning.
In the article To Serve is to Learn, writer Michael Rubino explains the difference between service projects and service-learning projects and shows how service-learning not only allows students to help others, but can also be used as a beneficial teaching concept that coaxes students to master class material while helping meet community needs.
And did you know that your service-learning project may qualify for funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture? In the article Rural Youth Impact Communities Through Living to Serve Grants, we give you all the details on how to apply for a Living to Serve grant, which could net your chapter $3,000 to $6,000!
So does Building Our American Communities ring a bell to you? It should, since it was the program that got us looking at community service in a whole new light and put us on our current service-learning path. Writer Beth A. DeHoff takes us on a mini-history lesson to show us how community development has evolved in FFA and how it can help your students grow.
If you haven’t checked out the organization’s LifeKnowledge leadership curriculum, you’re missing out! In the LifeKnowledge Spotlight, we delve into the curriculum’s materials that center around four stages of personal development, Me-We-Do-Serve, and lead to stronger skills in teamwork, goal-oriented problem solving and real-world applications necessary in successful community and service-learning projects.
But what better way to witness service-learning in action than to hear from someone who’s making it happen every day. We asked agricultural education teacher and FFA advisor Stephanie Jolliff to write this issue’s Perspectives and focus on her successful experiences with service-learning at Ridgemont High School in Ohio.
And finally, for this month’s Question for the Profession, Nina Crutchfield asks if you’re letting your students practice what you preach? Do you actually talk to your students about service or do you just hope that they pick it up from your actions? How do you ensure that your students are putting into practice service learning ? Read the article and then share your ideas and practices on the Communities of Practice forum.
We hope that you enjoy this issue of Making a Difference. As always, we love hearing your feedback on the articles so feel free to drop us a line. After all, we are all here to serve.
All the best,
JulieWoodard