This week's Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday is a contribution by one of our past contributors, Angela Insenga. Previously, Angela wrote an engaging post about "bridging the classics with YA texts." You can read it here. This week she writes about service learning and some of its connections to YA. I will turn it over to Angela.
My first foray into Service Learning projects (SLPs) had nothing yet everything to do with YA. I developed a grant-funded project for first-year college STEM majors wherein they chose a service site from a “menu” of community partners I had fostered; analyzed the needs of their participants; and created a program that highlighted STEM concepts. The catch: their perspective audience comprised first through fourth graders, some of whom were studying the solar system and others who were learning basic concepts in Biology. Thus, each of the seven SLP teams grappled with developing an age-appropriate program aimed at reinforcing the students’ existing curriculum. Randy Stoecker’s Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement taught me to privilege community need in any Service Learning endeavor, so I sought to teach students to synthesize STEM knowledge with an awareness of how their participants communicate and interact—science meets rhetorical situation, if you will.
Some students were surly during the planning and coaching phases of the project, unsure of how to proceed with their one-hundred-dollar budget; others were nervous about being around little kids (“They are sticky!” one young woman groused); some thrived, immediately creating hands-on projects blended with scientific explanations; and still others appeared apathetic to the whole gig, staring at me incredulously. But on site, like a match to dry tinder, my first-year college students took to their participants, who greeted them with an enthusiasm that was inspiring (REAL college students are fascinating to 2nd graders). The design of each program allowed them to discuss the existing school curriculum while guiding students through tactile, engaging activities. They made star jars while learning how stars are born and die; they learned about bacteria and then made hand sanitizer at carefully orchestrated stations around the room; they watched a student-made video on the life cycle of a sunflower and then drew their favorite stage; they heard about the phases of the moon and tried to create them by taking bites out of Oreo cookies; and they learned about planets before making their own. At one point, while I was acting in the role of the sun so that eight students could orbit around me, I looked across the crowded lawn to see the most reluctant of my students laughing with a shy and withdrawn second grader as they decided who would be Mercury and how Mercury might behave as it orbited. Would it tuck in its arms and crouch down? How might it spin? And should it shiver and shake or blow steam? I saw SLPs at work, doing community good for kids who would remember better because they had interacted as they learned. Though my time with these first-year students ended after two months, I could not shake the magic experienced in those classroom spaces. I wanted more of it and fast.
Because I first encountered YA in community schools while watching students pass a battered copy of Twilight back and forth or watching a kid try to hide Hopkins’s Glass in the spine of his literature anthology (an impossible feat if you have seen that hefty tome), it made sense to move my YA students “into the wild,” where they could work with both adolescent and “new adult” readers. As I had done before, I fostered site partners. Because this was my department’s first SLP in an upper-division English major course in over a decade, I was careful to choose physical sites close to or on campus: Ingram Library on my campus; the Lambda chapter at UWG, and the Newnan Carnegie Library. I also made contact with a virtual partner, LibriVox. Each student received a “spec document” for each potential project that explained the option’s purpose, provided the site partner’s contact and needs, and offered concrete ways to get started. Groups then chose their sites. I followed the same planning phase model as I had with the STEM students: YA groups met independently and with their site partner(s); I met with each group twice to coach and troubleshoot; and they deployed their projects. Throughout the two-month process, then, students achieved benchmarks while they prepared.
Each group encountered obstacles during this process. Some had interpersonal conflict as they sought to plan, and others struggled to find a common meeting time. They fought to choose texts they wanted to donate or discuss. They held fiery debate over how best to present materials to their audience. They (and I!) wrestled with technology. In sum, they behaved like budding professionals, learning how to negotiate their way towards a successful program.
Each group encountered obstacles during this process. Some had interpersonal conflict as they sought to plan, and others struggled to find a common meeting time. They fought to choose texts they wanted to donate or discuss. They held fiery debate over how best to present materials to their audience. They (and I!) wrestled with technology. In sum, they behaved like budding professionals, learning how to negotiate their way towards a successful program.
And successful they were. The LibriVox group settled on creating a dramatic reading of Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. They created voices for over 100 characters, even enlisting a dramatically-inclined friend to coach and participate. Their rendition of the text is now part of LibriVox wide-ranging library of free audiobooks. Ingram Library’s SLP folks created two book display cases that emphasized YA within Women’s History Month and did so again during Sexual Assault Awareness month. After researching our current YA holdings, this group also proposed a comprehensive list of YA “must haves” for ordering with my department’s yearly library allocation. The group working with Lambda settled on etiquette for their discussions of Julie Ann Peters’s germinal novel, Luna. They met four times with Lambda members to discuss “chunks” of reading. And, finally, the group working with Newnan Carnegie created a program on YA graphic novels in which participants learned the history of graphic novels and fashioned themselves as graphic novel characters at Makerspaces. The best creation won art supplies and graphic novels. As before, I felt more like a witness than a professor, noting this time the advanced performance as they considered nuances and acted swiftly to solve challenges.
Since Service Learning emphasizes process learning, I experienced intermittent fears that the ELA content central to my class would get lost. After all, this SLP served as a large portion of the grade in —25%— and my learning outcomes emphasize reading, writing about, and discussing YA literature. But, repeatedly, my worries were allayed, since each community partner’s needs foregrounded literature in unanticipated ways. At Ingram Library, the examination of cover art became an imperative while building eye-catching displays. Students in this group also had to locate powerful “pull-out” quotations that might attract patrons to their book cases. They had to decide how to choose and group texts in keeping with that month’s theme. In Newnan, my students had to conceive of ways to share content, not teach it, a difficult rhetorical shift, since all of them were enrolled in teacher training courses that included field work. The book club had to develop guiding questions for each meeting to foment discussion, and they collaborated to decide on doing much more listening to Lambda members than pontificating about the trans* teen experience. And the LibriVox volunteer group had to read Baum’s novel, annotate it carefully to parse out roles, and demonstrate clear articulation in audio submissions sent in for review by LibriVox mentors. In each case, my students encountered ELA content in context. Language and image came to the fore naturally, in keeping with the site partner’s needs. They saw their discipline working beyond the brick and mortar classroom.
Beginning next year, my university will have an official “Service Learning” designation for courses that include community work. I will request that my YA class is one of them. Just as practitioners and scholars in the field teach our students that age-appropriate literature affords teachers and parents with an opportunity to talk with young people about literature instead of at them, I now wish to show my students how YA can do its good work in various community arenas. I’m tired of only telling them.
Do you use Service Learning in YA? Tell me about it! I want to learn from you. ainsenga@westga.edu
Do you use Service Learning in YA? Tell me about it! I want to learn from you. ainsenga@westga.edu
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