What do you do with service-learning while the virus is rampaging? The knee-jerk reaction is perhaps to stop until the pandemic is over. Afterall, much service-learning require face-to-face human contact, in order to facilitate pertinent assistance, and the most effective learning.
Upon more rigorous thinking, however, stopping altogether is not really feasible, at least for us. Service-Learning for our university are credit-bearing subjects. Students need to successfully complete SL subjects in order to progress and to graduate. On the other hand, poor people do not stop being poor, people who need help do not stop needing help, under the threat of the virus. So we just have to find alternate, innovative ways to provide the service, and to facilitate the students’ learning.
It is for these reasons that our team has been as busy as usual during the past 2 months. We have been working with the teachers and NGO partners, win the beginning to try to reschedule and delay there service projects, in the hope that the virus will pass relatively quickly, so that we can resume the service projects later in the term. When it looks increasingly unlikely that we can conduct the projects in the foreseeable future, we are switching our focus to look for creative alternatives.
It was also for this reason that we met with the teachers again this morning, online, of course. One thing I noticed immediately was that the teachers are similar to students in at least one aspect - many prefer not to show their faces. I have heard from many many teachers, from secondary school to post-graduate courses, that the whole class would hide their faces. The teachers were forced to teach to a blank screen. It is a rare class where all the students show their faces. But they do exist - we have at least tow of those classes ourselves.
We were very happy to find that there are many creative practices. Some provide services online. Some services consists of teaching - languages, skills, etc. So it is similar to e-learning. It takes a lot of effort to organise, but it is feasible.
Some are asking the students to develop material, equipment, products, etc., that can be delivered to the partner NGOs, to be used by the NGOs themselves. One class develops assistive devices, such as tailor-made wheelchairs, which obviously require a lot of interactions with the client. In this case, they switch to developing small devices to be used by the NGO in house visits. Another class develops computer games and applications to be used by partner special-schools with their handicapped students.
One class usually work directly with children at community centers. This is practically impossible now. They are switching to work with the parents, online, to understand the needs of the children, to develop solutions for use by the parents with their children.
Some classes are turning to more indirectly modes of service-learning, including research of some sort.
What about those that are offshore? That's what we will tackle tomorrow.
Will these solutions work as well as what the classes were doing earlier? Maybe not. But it is better than not doing anything at all. And who knows? Some of the solutions might surprise us.
I thought about that massive e-learning that so many teachers, from primary to secondary to university to graduate school, are forced to do this semester. Most of us would not have done it willingly. But so many of us have become so much better in conducting e-learning. We are finding so many new, creative ways to teach, which would not have happened if not because of the virus. Some good is coming out of this mass movement to e-learning. The same, hopefully, will happen to being forced to find alternative means to deliver service-learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment