Service learning: a new approach to nurturing children’s emotional intelligence
How can we facilitate children’s learning and personal developing through community services?

We have been hearing the term ‘service learning’ more and more in the past few years. The term is spreading around the schools here in Paris as well. Over the past several months, I have been fortunate enough to be involved in some of the service learning-related projects and events in a primary school where I worked as a teaching intern, and the experience gave me a glimpse into how they look like and how they benefit the students as well as the community they live in.
What is service learning?
According to Vanderbilt University, service learning, or community engagement pedagogy, are “ones that combine learning goals and community service in ways that can enhance both student growth and the common good.” University of Maryland explains that “Service-learning combines community service with structured opportunities for learning”. As indicated in these definitions, service learning is a two-fold concept where both students’ learning goals and community service are sought to achieve. This is where service learning differentiate itself from other community service initiatives such as volunteering or civic engagement projects. Both are a form of community service but they do not necessarily involve a structured learning connection for the participants. This structured educational connection is what makes community service projects a service learning project.
Benefits of service learning
So why and how is service learning benefitial for students? There are a number of benefits which service learning can bring to students’ learning, personal and career developments.
First of all, service learning can improve students’ learning outcomes. The main reason is that service learning allows students to apply what they have learnt to the real-world issues (Vanderbilt University). In the primary school where I worked, students were involved in a project where they made sandwiches for refugees in Paris every Friday. In this project, children made hundreds of sandwiches every week, and in doing so, they utilised such skills as counting, measuring, maths, cooking and language which they learnt in school. This has been an opportunity for students to apply the skills they learnt in the real world, and in doing so they demonstrated an increased understanding of the content areas.

Second, service learning can enhance children’s personal development. While engaging in several service learning projects, our students showed an increased level of compassion and awareness to real-life problems, and some of them even initiated their own smaller-scale projects. One example is the “Fruits for Paris” project, where one student from Grade 3 called to the whole school and asked students to bring fruits to donate to the refugees. This student did a research beforehand about what kinds of fruits would be appreciated by the refugees, and asked the students to bruing specific fruits. In this process, this student obviously utilised her skills learnt in school such as ICT skills, interviewing skills and research skills, but she also leveraged her ‘soft skills’, such as problem-analysis and solving skills, critical thinking skills, communication skills and collaboration skills in order to bring the project into full fruition.

The third connection is career development. Several research attest that service learning can enhance students’ career planning and aspirations. Service learning may enable students to make connections with professionals and adults in the community, and cultivate their personal efficacy and leadership skills that can lead to greater career prospects (Vanderbilt University). In our primary school, several groups of students initiated projects where they developed promotional materials to advocate the culture of service learning throughout the school. One of them created a news broadcast and reported several student-led service learning projects. Four girls from Grade 5 were involved in this project and all of them did a very good job as student news reporters. Others launched a podcast containing interviews with student service learning practitioners, storytelling about refugees and a ‘theme song’ about service learning. Throughout the project, the students acted as radio personalities, storyteller, singers or composer and they collaborated very well to make one podcast programme. Other students became news writers, bloggers, video editors and geography researchers, and they all produced different digital media to promote the culture of service learning throughout the school community. Along the way, children had opportunities to enhance their academic skills and leadership, and got insights into different kinds of vocations and careers.

Transversal skills, or types of skill such as emotional maturity, social skills, global citizenship and service to others, are considered to be key skills for children’s holistic growth in the 21st century. Service learning can be an effective pedagogical tool to foster children’s transversal skills to grow into a socially responsible adult. The implication of all this is that we should endeavour to promote the culture of service learning in our own school as well as in community.
