The Best Field Trip

When I was young and growing up, my family went through a wide variety of tough circumstances and maladies, as any and every family does. I say this not to get into past circumstances, but instead to frame the context of a personal and professional interest of mine. Depending on the context, the degree program or school your in, or your criminal record, it goes by many names. Service learning, community service, court ordered service, and the like. Past family experience, my own mom's career as a social worker, and trips as a child to local soup kitchens and the like instilled a strong desire to help others within me.

 When I was in college, I was typical kid vacillating between mature budding adult and immature poor decision making teenager. I found myself in a class that provided a community service opportunity teaching and tutoring people who lived in a local homeless shelter. It is something I jumped at the chance to join and it was a program that I was involved with throughout all four years of my college experience. It was an experience that I consider to be profoundly formative in my life, and the bonus, ten years later my love of teaching and service that was born in that homeless shelter still lives on today.

My first teaching job was at a public school in Orlando. My first order of business after figuring out how to lesson plan and establish rules in my class was to establish a community service based after school club. Thus, Freedom Films was born. The idea of the club was that on Friday we would meet and watch a movie. The following week, we would pick a community service job related to the movie we watched. For example, watching Iron Man would lead to a discussion focused on heroism within our community and we would write thank you letters to military members stationed in the Middle East. We had a variety of activities and it changed every week. I paid for snacks out of pocket and enjoyed my small group of 3-5 kids and one adult. Then something happened and the group grew to 10 then 20 then 50. By my last year at that school, our club had more than 110 members and we were biting off chunks of larger projects. The club later spawned other branches at local schools around Central Florida.

In my second year at my current school, I was approached by my principal about leading a service learning initiative at our middle school. The idea behind it was we would start at a very base level and hopefully build a program from the ground up. We would require students to complete a very modest number of hours doing service work in the community. I jumped at the chance, made a website, and immediately began reaching out to the local community.

While doing this work I began to research similar programs around the world. I found some truly inspiring programs around the world but a nagging question kept popping into my head as I dove deeper and deeper. Do requirement programs do anything? Does a requirement kill natural initiative and the desire to do this sort of work? My main goals were to help the community and instill within my students a love and desire to participate in sustainable projects that could benefit their own development and programs that inspire them. I read a few articles arguing that requiring service hours had the same impact as overloading kids with homework, it killed the love to help. Others suggested that exposing students to new opportunities they wouldn't have come across anyway can spark interest in service projects.

I was torn on the issue. Creating and fostering a sustainable program designed to help the community was something I was deeply passionate about but I wanted to avoid the creation of a requirement to be checked off or trivialization of such programs. So I did what made the most sense to me, I asked the kids. For one of our writing prompt assignments, I gave students the opportunity to sound off on the topic. Should schools require service learning? The results were yet again split. Many students wrote about the very things I was wrestling with. The idea of requiring service and the benefit of potentially sparking a natural interest remained.

Let's jump ahead a bit. Throughout this introspective period our school and our students continued with the program as is. With the help of my school's CAS Coordinator, we set up a trip to a local orphanage. Specifically, we visited an orphanage that houses students with special needs. Within a day of posting a sign up sheet for the optional trip, I had maxed out my total amount of students I could bring and I had a wait list ten students long. The results were the same with the CAS program. Regardless of whether it was due to requirement or simply student interest, we had our trip filled.

The morning of the trip, all 26 students met on campus at 7:00am (on a Saturday!) and we set off for the trip. Our work was simple. We played with the kids and took them for a walk. With many of the kids living at the orphanage struggling with wheelchairs and needs that made it impossible for them to walk without support, they didn't get out a lot. We had middle and high school students carrying infants, pushing wheelchairs, and walking arm and arm with kids with muscular dystrophy. The afternoon was full of laughter and smiles from all those involved. When we returned, our kids helped the orphanage feed the kids lunch. For many of the orphans with severe needs, our students had the opportunity to help feed them and wipe their mouths. After lunch was served they cleaned the kitchens and continued to play with them until it was time to leave. The maturity, leadership, and willingness to do whatever was required on the part of my students was remarkable. I left the field trip inspired and hoped that it had a similar impact on our students.

For many of those students, they were simply fulfilling their required hours. For others, it was an eye-opening experience. The trip only took place a little over a week ago. Since then, I have had students ask me to set up another trip to the orphanage. Some have already reached out to local affiliate orphanages closer to our school and scheduled trips on their own. I've had kids propose fund raisers designed to help raise money for supplies needed at the shelter. I've had students begin putting toy drives together for Christmas and others do the same for school supplies and books. It all filled my heart and truly inspired me. But as with most things, I realize that sometimes the initial momentum of a recent trip can fade. However I am full of hope that these programs will be sustainable and inspired by the initiative that my students have shown.

However, amid the chaos of 26 students or more getting involved, the thing that made the most impact on me came from one student who came on the trip. The day after the trip, this student's mom came up to me and told me that the trip impacted him deeply. She told me how this student went home after the trip, sat down with his parents, and described what he had seen, what he had done, and how he wanted to continue to help. She told me that her son, herself, and her husband spent the better part of the evening talking about it all while crying. The next Monday, we started our creative writing assignment in my language arts class. The  protagonist of his story was a kid with Down's Syndrome. He wrote from the perspective of one of the kids he had met on the trip. Perhaps this trip was a moment that will resonate with him and his family. Perhaps it becomes formative for him moving forward. But even if it's not, it was reassuring and impactful for me. It helped lend clarity to the service learning debate raging in my own head.

I am not telling this story to simply talk about cool stuff I've had the opportunity to do, or highlight the work of my students. But rather, I am sharing it to frame the context of this my own reflection. I think all professionals should be reflective in their work, whether that be teaching, construction, or providing medical care. There were 25 pre-service teachers who were a part of that first program at the homeless shelter. It was required for many of them and voluntary for others. I have no idea how many later became teachers or social workers, or folks who regularly contributed to the community. Maybe all of them. Maybe only me. But what I do know is that one experience, shaped my perception of the world. Since that first day at the homeless shelter, I have led or participated in programs focused on engaging students to participate in the same opportunities. By my count I have been in organizations with, and worked alongside more than 600 students doing community service projects so far. I deeply hope that if even 1% of those kids find a love doing service work, maybe they grow up to be adults who have their own 500 students and doing projects. More would be better, but if that can be achieved, it seems like the program as it stands is enough.