CR#1: Engagement in Your Community
By Ryan Bergman
Most of us are raised to look at the “less fortunate” and sympathize with them, occasionally giving them things we assume they need. We rarely take a look at what those that are considered less fortunate can give us though, and that mindset is where volunteering is born. Volunteering is taking your free time and using part of it to help the “less fortunate.” There’s an aspect to it that puts the volunteer above the people that are benefitting from their service, and volunteering is very much an opportunity for people who have the means to freely use their time for activities that don’t specifically benefit themselves. On the other hand, Service Learning is finding your place within your own community and using that as an opportunity for personal and professional growth in a way that benefits both parties involved. Mike Goldstein explains in his section on Urban Core Internships that it was key to go after work study funds when setting up this program so that they wouldn’t see what they saw in volunteer programs, which was that they students that were excluded “were the less affluent ones, particularly minority students — not because they were not interested but because they couldn’t afford it”(124). He managed to invert that structure by going after work study funds, which ultimately gave students that had to work to go to school anyway a chance at learning something while they worked, and “Urban Corps was simply a transferring of students from one setting where they got money, but not learning, to another setting where they were getting it all — the learning and the service combined (124).” Volunteering is a great opportunity for certain people, but service learning is a great opportunity for growth for everyone.
My role in my community is always changing and growing, which is one of the amazing things about service learning. Right now my role is transitioning as my position as a student leader is changing. Previously, my student leadership was at Marin’s Community School, where I will only be tutoring for my CASC required hours instead of over seeing the other tutors. My new student leadership will take place at AVID at San Rafael High School, which will be a huge opportunity for growth for me. I haven’t tutored or worked at the AVID program before, so I have a big chance to fully engross myself in an atmosphere I’m totally unfamiliar with, and as a prospective teacher, it gives me another opportunity to make connections in the academia of San Rafael. One of the best parts of working in the high schools is having the chance to meet people that have been through this process as well and can guide or influence the way I approach things in the classroom, and service learning at multiple high schools allows me to fully utilize that opportunity. Most importantly though, I’m working on fully giving myself over to the community that I have grown so much in, an academic world that is so reliant on you simply being there; not for the sake of giving the community something they didn’t already have, but to balance out what they have given me: an understanding of who I want to be as a person and as a teacher in a era where people strive to come in and fix the system instead of being a part of it. In her article “Helping, Fixing, Serving,” Remen explains that “when we serve, we don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves, and we draw from all of our experiences,” something that continues to resinate with me as my understanding of why serving this community is so important to me grows; every experience, every interaction, every conversation I have changes and enhances my outlook on life as a whole, giving it a newfound purpose and passion.
