Voices from the Middle - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2009

The editors introduce the topic of Service-Learning as it applies to language arts classrooms, allowing young adolescents to use their knowledge in meaningful, real-world contexts. As a community-based approach to literacy, service-learning involves the application of academic skills to address or solve issues and problems in the world.

Educators are seeing a ray of hope as policymakers across political lines acknowledge that prescriptive education is not working and as educators find success in involving students actively in real work and meaningful goals within their communities. Glickman and Thompson define service-learning, offer successful examples from real classrooms, and ask, “Are we ready to push further the connection of service and learning in our classrooms, schools, and universities?”

This paper explores the ways one school continues to enhance both literacy and service-learning through the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. Over the course of their middle-school years, young adolescents at Canterbury School visit a range of sites in the community. They also explore service-learning at home and around the world by linking service-learning explicitly to academic tasks. An experiential learning unit in seventh grade allows students to understand global issues and challenges from participants’ perspectives. They then bring these perspectives to bear in service-learning and in writing assignments in the eighth-grade year.

Service-learning is an instructional methodology teachers can use to foster student engagement in rigorous curricula. Through service-learning, middle level students see that what they are learning in school is real and important, and that they can be valued, contributing members of society. In this article, the Titans team at Remington Middle School embraces service-learning. The “Make the Switch!” public-awareness campaign is an example of how a service-learning project can be used to expose students to curriculum standards through rich, authentic learning contexts while also promoting the social-emotional growth of young adolescents.

“Now seems an opportune time to turn our attention back to the question of how our education system is going to contribute to helping our children become thoughtful, ethical, caring, and contributing democratic citizens.” Wilhelm documents the fact that students “crave the doing of significant work,” and posits that this is what we are teaching for—to help students see themselves as “agents of possibility.” He sees this goal as part of every class and every unit, and urges teachers to take on the challenge.

Our students may seem savvy and technologically comfortable, but they are still young, still growing, and still struggling with a broad spectrum of challenges. The books reviewed here introduce characters dealing with those same changes, and may provide just what some young reader is looking for.

As teachers, our most important mission is to turn our students into readers. It sounds so simple, but it’s hard work, and we’re all on a deadline. Kittle describes a class in which her own expectations that students would become readers combined with a few impassioned strategies succeeded … at least with a young man named Alan.

The benefits of service-learning are numerous, and some are hard to come by any other way. Service-learning projects help teachers and students come together in new ways, demonstrate how language skills can help accomplish real-life tasks, and engage students in a way that spurs them to learn more thoroughly and quickly. The lessons can last a lifetime and make a real difference to the students and those they help.

No matter how your students define adventure, they are sure to find some in this selection of favorites. Think about a book talk on this collection to get the pages turning.

When the National Gallery of Writing opens to the public on October 20, Hayes is hoping to hear from every profession, every socioeconomic group, every race, and … your students. Here are ideas for the many forms that writing might take, as well as a list of resources to help make writing for the gallery a unique experience for each writer.

The books in this month’s column provide the research base, strategies, and resources to help you develop a socially relevant, critically focused curriculum that will, in turn, offer challenging and exciting community and/or global experiences for your students. Reviewed are: What Research REALLY Says about Teaching and Learning to Read, by Stephen B. Kucer; Service-Learning . . . by Degrees: How Adolescents Can Make a Difference in the Real World by Alice Terry and Jann Bohnenberger; Using Technology in Middle Grades Language Arts: Strategies to Improve Student Learning, by K. Hunter-Mintz; Teaching Writing That Matters: Tools and Projects That Motivate Adolescent Writers, by Chris W. Gallagher and Amy Lee.

The role of content-area teachers in reading instruction has long been a subject of debate. Chant, a social studies teacher educator, reasons through the argument that content-area teachers should also be reading teachers while balancing that with the demands on content-area teachers and the complex training required to be a skilled reading teacher. Ultimately, he posits that this is a two-way street, and while content-area teachers are focusing on reading, reading teachers can focus equally on content. Together, they share a goal to make better readers.

Gilles champions the role of teacher research, both as a systematic inquiry into one’s own teaching practice and as a way to contribute to the professionalism and practice of other teachers through publication.