Outcomes from catholic service-learning.

Abstract

Service-learning attempts to reconnect communities, schools, and students in the name of democracy and the benefit of the disenfranchised. Catholic schools have added another component, framing service as the exercise of one's faith in benefit to marginalized groups. This paper draws on interviews conducted with seniors at an urban parochial high school. Outcomes from their service experiences are examined vis-a-vis the goals of their high school's Christian service program.

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Historical Roots of Contemporary Concerns

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville (1969) asserted that America's communal bonds were casual and transient, in part because of individuals' "restlessness in the midst of prosperity," and because Americans "never stop thinking of the good things they have not got" (p. 565). He coined an essential phrase to capture the characteristics and traits he was witnessing--individualisme. De Tocqueville warned, however, that the strong notion of individualism could eventually lead to the isolation of individuals, threatening the foundations of American society. Indeed, Barber (1992) and other observers of contemporary society (e.g., Bellah et al., 1985; Putnam, 2000) conclude that, in the last half century in particular, individualism, autonomy, and self-reliance have triumphed over civic commitment and responsibility. Metz and Furman (1997) argue that the strong anti-communitarian ethos has extended to our school systems, resulting in students who experience a lack of connection not only between classroom learning and their personal lives, but also between classroom learning and public issues. Even those who come to school ready to learn cannot be effectively educated if a sizable minority of them lack a personal stake in the society. Clearly, educators and communities need to re-examine the role that youth play in a civic-oriented, democratic society.

Service-Learning as Dewey's Experiential Learning

The theoretical foundations of service-learning are attributed to John Dewey (1938; 1956) who argued that the key to learning is the interaction of knowledge and skills with experience. Dewey's focus was on the "inert knowledge problem" (Whitehead, 1929), or the tendency of students to acquire stores of knowledge that are useless in new situations (Eyler and Giles, 1999). Through experiential education, by contrast, students are challenged to discover relationships among ideas for themselves, rather than passively receiving the information through prescriptive or "banking" methods (Freire, 1970) about such relationships from the authorities around them (Dewey, 1916). Dewey argued that discovering relationships is a wholehearted affair, linking emotions and intellect by capturing student interest and passion. Such learning is intrinsically valued because it deals with problems that incite the student's curiosity (Giles and Eyler, 1994). Dewey viewed the student's community as an integral part of the educational experience, because it represents what is most familiar and comfortable and provides a venue for the application of knowledge outside of school bounds. Community-based learning, therefore, could be central both to the advancement of the student and to the betterment of future societies.

Catholic Education: Looking Outside the Box

Catholic schools have been the focus of considerable interest and controversy among educational researchers and policy makers since Coleman and Hoffer's (1987) and Greeley's (1982) studies linking the academic success of Black inner-city students to their attendance at Catholic schools. More recently, Catholic schools have found themselves under the lens of public school reform, specifically in terms of their role in the voucher system debate. Given the vanishing borders between private, religious schools and the education of the general public, an examination of the role that Catholic schools and their programs might play in the common good, and in specifically redirecting youth into civic arenas, is creditable.

Furthermore, Catholic education deserves attention because Catholicism teaches that one's faith and love for God is demonstrated most clearly in active service to others. By aspiring to the examples set by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, Catholics should understand that being agents of transformation and social justice is a duty of every Christian. In a 1995 public address, Pope John Paul II alluded to the ability of Catholic education's teachings of social justice to permeate classroom walls and transcend spirituality to incorporate the political. He stressed that the role of Catholic education in the transformation of society is to help students to become critical of their world and of their own experiences. Oldenski (1997) explains that students learn to become critical thinkers and political transformers through a three-step process that echoes the Catholic action movement of the early 1900s: see, reflect, act. These steps are paralleled in the current literature vis-a-vis critical pedagogy as conscientization, dialogue, and action, respectively. Oldenski supported and echoed the Pope's message:

   One exercises faith by participating in the transformation of
   society toward a more just and democratic society and by
   establishing a solidarity with other people, including a
   commitment to the poor, and the victims of gender, class, and
   race oppression (p. 36).

In fact, according to Pope John Paul II (1995), the benefits of Carbolic education's social justice component reach beyond the students who learn the required curriculum and those individuals oppressed by dominant groups: "Catholic education serves the future of all Americans by teaching and communicating the very virtues on which American democracy rests." The final reason for studying service-learning programs in Catholic schools is because the presence of a religious component in studies of high school service-learning programs has been rare in the current literature. This exclusion is even more bewildering given that community service-learning programs have been implemented at the secondary level for many years. Therefore, such an inclusion would serve to extend the empirical foundations of both service-learning and Catholic education.

Christian Service at Saint Jerome Catholic High School

Saint Jerome Catholic High School is located in Southern California. The enrollment at St. Jerome's for the 2000-2001 school year was 324 boys and 277 girls; seventy-six percent of enrolled students were Roman Catholic. Demographically, St. Jerome's reports extreme sociocultural and socioeconomic diversity in its student body. At the time of data collection, minority ethnic groups composed 60% of the school's total population and over one-quarter of students had qualified for, and subsequently had been granted, financial assistance. In response to the goals of St. Jerome Catholic High School ("To encourage responsible participation in the world community") and of the St. Jerome Parish ("To form loving disciples who will transform the world"), each student is required to complete 100 hours of Christian Service before graduating. The program is progressive both in the number of hours and level of community participation. The expectations for students per year are as follows:

* 9th Grade: 10 hours working within a religious community

* 10th Grade: 20 hours directly serving youth

* 11th Grade: 30 hours in interaction with the elderly, infirmed, or disabled

* 12th Grade: 40 hours through direct work with the poor

Methodology and Participant Sample

The data for this study were collected over a two-month period. Individual interviews were the primary data collection method used. Participants had to be seniors who had attended Saint Jerome's for all four years of high school, and who had completed all

Christian service requirements by the time the study began. To identify the participants that met these criteria, a letter was read to all senior level religion classes by the chair of the Religion Studies Department. Participation was voluntary, and open to any student who met all of the criteria. Six seniors expressed interest in participating in the study. In the end, only three of these students were interviewed. Additional attempts to include the other three individuals were cut short by student participation in a school-sponsored overnight retreat, extended holiday periods, and individual logistical conflicts. School documents were also collected, and selected samples from a manifest document analysis have been included. A short biographical introduction for each participant follows. Pseudonyms have been used.

Pablo is 17 years old and self-defines as Mexican. He is an active member of the Catholic Church. Pablo was raised in a Catholic family setting, went to Catholic schools except in elementary school, chose to be confirmed, and goes to church services every Sunday. In high school, he has earned "pretty good grades," though he claims that he could have done better. Pablo's extracurricular schedule is kept busy by sports and a part-time job. Pablo volunteered one day a week for two months in a convalescent home during middle school.

Sandy is 17 years old and Hispanic. Sandy is an active member of the Catholic Church, having attended Catholic schools since pre-school and having chosen to be confirmed. She attends mass on Sundays and celebrates Catholicism culturally at home. Sandy is an honors student at St. Jerome's. Sandy juggles a demanding course load, a part-time job, and several extracurricular activities, including the Environmental and Key Clubs at the high school. When asked why she decided to become a member of these two clubs, she explained: "They make me feel good about myself, like helping other people. I'm a helping person." Like Pablo, Sandy also had her first volunteer experiences during middle school. She assisted during mass as an altar server, created homemade cards for hospitalized elderly, and filled food and clothing baskets for delivery to local homeless shelters.

Blake is 18 years old and lives with his father. Blake's parents are both from England, so he describes his ethnicity as Anglo. Although he is Roman Catholic, Blake explains that he is "in the middle" in terms of his acceptance of the Catholic Church's doctrines and teachings. He attends church services irregularly because he "does not want to conform." Unlike the other two participants, only Blake's father is Catholic; his mother is an atheist. When asked what type of student he was, Blake answered:

   [Schoolwork] doesn't come to me very easily. I'm hard working,
   responsible, committed, [and II try hard. I've been on honors a
   couple of years; I'll probably be on
   honors list this semester.

Blake works at a shoe store for 15 hours a week. He likes to skateboard, surf, work on cars, and spend time with his girlfriend. Blake demonstrates his love of the beach by volunteering with local "Adopt a Beach" campaigns. He explained that his father had instilled in him a sense of "helping others."

Outcomes and Discussion

Enhancement of Learning

The participants at St. Jerome's reported that their service experiences enhanced their traditional in-school lessons through two means. The first is through self-initiated reflection. The students noted, in particular, that religion and history lessons were underscored during their visits to service sites. During his 30 hours serving the elderly, Blake became aware of the limitations of his didactic history lessons while he learned supplementary material: I learned so much from [the elderly], and how things used to be. They shared their knowledge of what actually happened in the past. It was cool! Sandy discussed how she had noticed a connection to previous lessons in Religion and English, although they were not mentioned explicitly in class. Because we take a religion course, there is a lot that has to do with it. Like book chapters on peace, violence, how to improve society. In English class too, I see some of it in the readings. I'll think [about] it in my head although it's not mentioned in class. The students also reflected on their service experiences exclusive of indirect curricular prompts. For example, when asked if she reflected about her experiences outside of the school setting, Sandy commented:

   Yeah, most of my friends go to St. Jerome's or another Catholic
   school, so they have to do [Christian Service hours] too. So it
   is inevitable that it comes up in conversation....

Pablo commented, however, that no explicit connection was made by the teachers between service experiences and school lessons. He hypothesized that this was due to the diverse service experiences of the students, but he did not explain how this prevented connections between the two. The second means through which in-school lessons were enhanced by service experiences was in teacher-directed Christian Service Projects. Guidelines for the Christian Service Project, given at the midpoint of the second semester, direct students to reflect on four questions and to use them as the outline for their papers. The topics include service site information, what the student learned, what population was served, and what the student realized about himself/herself (St. Jerome Christian Service Policy, 2000). In addition to a reflection paper, students make presentations on their experiences and design quilt swatches that represent their service experiences. Although the reflection papers would have provided the researcher with an emic view into the participants' experiences, none of the three participants retained his/her paper.

Promoting Personal Development

Parallel to the adolescent's cognitive growth is a complementary development of affectivity; each of the three St. Jerome's participants reported being valued for their knowledge and personal qualities as one positive outcome to their service experiences. Both Pablo and Blake discussed the feeling of enjoyment and belonging that they experienced when elderly and little leaguer service recipients paid attention to their lives and funds of knowledge. Pablo, I liked the stories that the elderly told to me because they were true. Also, they were interested in me. They asked me about my family, where I go to school, and what I like to study. I liked being listened to. Blake, I had a lot of fun [assisting the little league team] because I liked playing baseball when I was little, but stopped because I didn't want to play in high school and I had the skills to teach them things that I had learned myself from other people. The girls would get into games and would want to win. They liked to be there, looked up to us, and would listen to us. They'd follow what we told them to do, then they'd improved their skills and started winning, so they were happy, which made us happy .... I was surprised that the girls actually listened to us and weren't embarrassed to talk to us, just thought of us as pan of team, as coaches. They'd talk to us and ask questions. I thought they would be embarrassed or shy. We were pan of [sic] team at end. We even went to [sic] team party.

On a more emotional level, each of the participants reported similar reactions to their experiences with the elderly during their junior year. They had felt uneasy at first about completing 30 hours serving the elderly, but had found it to be one of the most interesting and worthwhile experiences. Sandy's quote encapsulates this view. At first I didn't want to go [to the convalescent home] because I was stereotyping them. I thought they're old people and grouchy and I thought that [the staff] would want me to change [the elderly clients'] bedpans. But it turned out that I set myself up to [have] a horrible experience because they were old people. It turned out to be interesting because they had interesting stories; they are really knowledgeable.

Development of Civic Responsibility/Citizenship

A manifest analysis of the "St. Jerome's Christian Service Policy" supports previous findings about service-learning's role in reinforcing participatory altruism and building civic responsibility. It states that the call to service is in part a response to St. Jerome Catholic High School's goal "To encourage responsible participation in the world community." The students' responses also demonstrate evidence that service-learning is fostering a stronger sense of civic obligation. Their sens civique, however, was mainly exhibited toward the communities to which they had already felt connected. Pablo, for example, completed his ninth grade service requirements at the same church where he had attended pre-school. During his sophomore year, he also returned to a site with which he had a personal connection. I went to Mt. Olive Lutheran Church.... I went there for pre-school and knew the Director of Activities, so I went and asked him if I could complete my [service] requirements there. I thought it was a good place.... For my Sophomore hours, I went to St. Clement's Church to help teach catechism .... I decided on St. Clement's because that is where I did confirmation. I had a personal connection.

Like Pablo, Sandy and Blake also completed service hours at familiar sites. For their freshman requirements, Sandy volunteered at her own parish and Blake volunteered at St. Jerome's Parish. Both Sandy and Blake made service connections for their sophomore year through friends. Sandy worked at a camp for mentally impaired children, and Blake worked with his friend's dad coaching an all-girl little league softball team.

Although the students' choices seem to be based in altruism and nostalgia, further probing by the investigator revealed that the participants had made their choices mainly out of self-interest and/or procrastination. Blake, for example, waited to the end of both his freshman and junior years before he sought out a service site. Both years, he became nervous about not completing his hours, so he asked for help. I was new to St. Jerome's and didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't really know what service hours were since I never did them before. It was a last minute type of thing .... I went to [my religion teacher] and he told me to come [to St. Jerome's Parish] on Saturday and Sunday. I worked at a retirement home. [The Key Club moderator] set it up. Key Club goes every year about once a week .... It was set up by the school. I just had to fill out the form; you know, with the time arrived and time left. [The Key Club moderator] would check it off when he went [to the retirement home] every Thursday.

Although Sandy also procrastinated until the second semester, she chose her service sites for logistical reasons: "II] decided to go [to Cathedral Chapel] because I don't drive, so it is difficult for me to get around; it was local." Her response shows that students choose sites that will make the service experience easiest for them. In other words, these quotes suggest that service experiences are not chosen entirely out of altruism.

Benefits Accruing to Community

The second tenet on which "St. Jerome's Christian Service Policy" rests comes from the social justice foundations of the Catholic Church, as reflected in the St. Jerome's Parish motto: "To form loving disciples who will transform the world." Service-learning appropriately allows for students to transcend their self-preoccupation and to care for those with whom they have associative relations (i.e., their community members). Delve et al. (1990) note that as students mature in the service experience, they tend to move from a focus on charitable activities to a concern for social justice. Coles (1993) points out that "today's students are likely to express their lofty political and social impulses and practical desires to change the world through community service" (p. 40). The transition from charity to transformation supports the role of service-learning as a form of social inquiry, which links education to citizenship. In this situation, students function as contributing citizens during the process of study while acquiring skills and knowledge that equip them for later civic participation (Giles and Eyler, 1994).

Although evidence shows that the three participants viewed their service experiences as charitable, but not entirely altruistic, several examples of their critical judgment support that the movement toward social justice is indeed incremental in nature. Pablo described an occasion when he was volunteering at a convalescent center, but made a conscious decision to end his service.

   I used to volunteer at a convalescent home on Fridays ... for
   about three hours a day.... I did [the service] on my own, but I
   stopped because it was not a clean place and the elderly people
   there were not looked after.... I didn't feel comfortable being
   there; it was unethical.

Blake's questioning of his history text also demonstrates the role that service experiences can have in empowering service providers to see previously accepted phenomena through a new, critical lens. It allows them to question and look beyond the surface level of material presented to them. What remains unclear after the interviews, however, is whether Pablo and Blake will advance beyond the reflective stage of critical pedagogy and take action. Even so, Giles and Eyler (1994) posit that although students may be developmentally frozen in performing and reflecting on charitable activities, they are still acquiring skills and knowledge that equip them for later civic participation and social justice.

Community service traditionally is connected to Catholic high schools and independent schools, which emphasize altruism and a concern for the poor. The rationale is that one gives back or repays the community because one has received many benefits from the community (Chapin, 1997). The projects involve concrete tasks (e.g., Blake pulling weeds at St. Jerome's Parish and picking up trash off the beach) that do not necessarily have the strong political or social action focus of, for example, a whole class involved in advocating for and learning about the homeless (Youniss et al., 1997). While community service can be very rewarding for the students by connecting them to the social life of the community, it does not necessarily facilitate cognitive development, increase political efficacy, or stimulate the political process (Chapin, 1997). The following patchwork of quotes from Sandy demonstrates this point.

   [Service] helps the community and, in essence, helps you become a
   better person.... It is giving back to the community in a broad
   sense, but if you analyze it, it also is making you feel like you
   are important and are doing something.... How to improve how we
   treat others little by little.

Findings do show, however, that although it is not justice-oriented, community service does have positive outcomes. For example, those served by community service projects seemed happy and appreciative (Blake), are sad to see their service providers leave (Sandy), and ask for the students to visit again (Pablo). These reactions indicate that young people engaged in experiential education positively affect community members. Furthermore, the attitudes of young people frequently are significantly changed in the process of helping others. This, of course, is most strikingly noted in these participants' experiences with the elderly during their junior year.

Conclusion

An analysis of data collected delineates four student reported outcomes to service-learning experiences in St. Jerome's Christian service program. First, interviews with students indicated that service activities enhance traditional in-class learning. For St. Jerome's seniors, this support came primarily through both self-initiated and guided reflection activities. Second, a promotion of personal/affective development was noted. Findings showed that seniors enjoyed service experiences which permitted them to engage in activities where they felt that their knowledge and skills were valued by service recipients. Third, students reported that they had become more civically connected to communities to which they had previous connections. Analysis did show, however, that these connections were due primarily to a lack of transportation or because students had procrastinated in finding service sites. Lastly, findings revealed that students were critical of their experiences, and the sites in which they served; however, their lack of action in response to these critiques evidenced a lack of a social justice orientation in the Christian service program.

These findings from a Catholic high school service program echo previous empirical service-learning studies in both secondary and postsecondary secular educational institutions. In particular, promoting a spirit of volunteerism and community service has been noted as the pathway for drawing young people into their communities (Wuthnow, 1991; Coles, 1993; Lisman, 1998)--a positive finding in light of the growing civic apathy and the diminution of social capital in modern America (Putnam, 2000). Eyler and Giles (1999) argue however that education for civic responsibility is not a substitute for the more instrumental goal of learning to use what has been learned. Nonetheless, Westheimer and Kahne (1993) note that students and teachers involved in such activities, as for those at St. Jerome's, experience a sense of membership. Furthermore, community service-learning facilitates the transformation of a young person from a passive recipient of facts to an active service provider and, consequently, helps redefine the perception of youth in the community from a cause of problems to a source of solutions.

With regard to the religious influence of the program under examination, the teachings and practice of one's Catholic faith should theoretically deepen the strong civic and change-oriented tenets of service-learning. Catholicism advocates for an ongoing recursive process of reflection, critique, and action--a process of praxis, or the integration of reflection and practice. For this reason, Catholic schools and their instructional programs are implicitly charged with providing students with a language of possibility for themselves and the world. They understand, as well, that being agents of transformation is part of what it means to practice one's faith.

St. Jerome's students' experiences and outcomes from these activities showed that the reflection and critique notions of Catholic social justice movements are indeed outcomes from the present curricular design of the service program. However, students failed to act upon their critique, and thus failed to complete the social justice component understood in Catholic education. Without action, Catholic service-learning results in charity rather than social justice, a direct contradiction to the religious doctrine on which it originated.

Students might need to extend their focus of service to include less comfortable, and more marginalized settings in order to provide a greater opportunity to critically address the social justice tenets of Catholicism. Given that the seniors interviewed were forced to rely on previous connections for service sites because of transportation problems or because they had procrastinated, schools should examine the possibility of providing transportation to sites for students who might otherwise be restricted. Also, the accessibility of transportation might motivate the students to begin their service activities earlier. Mid-semester checks to see whether service activities had been started could also serve to decrease procrastination, and send a message for students to engage in more than the required number of hours.

Because students chose their own service sites in this particular program, and thus had different experiences, participant outcomes from reflective activities varied. School programs might, therefore, address these variations by implementing class level service projects. This option does not take into account the advantages, or logistical necessity, of allowing students to pick their own service activities, however. Another means to determine the enhancement in students' learning would be to track longitudinally their reflections via a reflection notebook/journal. Although students will differ individually in terms of their progression toward critical consciousness and its manifestations, reflection enhances opportunities for each student to reach this stage. For this reason, schools, and in particular teachers, should tailor reflection activities to facilitate students along the trajectory from passive volunteering to active agents of social change.

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Trae Stewart, University of Southern California

Stewart is a doctoral candidate in International/Intercultural education. His research interests include the sociological foundations of education, critical pedagogy, and service-learning.