Kairos 14.3: Paquette and Warren, The Things They Carry – Debriefing: Telling War Stories p1

SUSTAINS

Students enjoy assignments that are outside the scope of the norm, as it makes them feel special ("We are doing something you aren't!") with a taste of entrepreneurism ("We are the only ones doing it!"). Students are more likely to perform with excellence when they like the assignment and when they believe the assignment is not only for a grade but for their own betterment.
Typically, people naturally like to help people as it makes them, again, feel special and appreciated. Service-learning projects that take students out of the stuffy classroom and into the living room of the underprivileged, the barracks room of the undereducated, or the jail cell of the incarcerated introduce privileged, educated, and free-thinking young people to those who are often ignored by a society unwilling to help and overeager to exploit.
Writing is communal, social, and collaborative by nature. Individuals do not learn communication skills in a vacuum but discover fairly quickly that they are playing to an audience. Teachers discover fairly quickly that writing skills presented in the vacuum of the traditional classroom are all too often dumped once students escape the vacuum. Helping students to teach what they've learned to those who exist outside the classroom vacuum and in the community at large will logically and inevitably lead to their growth as writers in their social realm.

IMPROVES

An initial consideration for improving future undertakings: just as surely as it is wise to begin a course only after one has gathered all the course textbooks, so would it be wise to have in hand all the materials needed for a service-learning project before the scholastic year begins. This means there must be both an effort to collect stories (or narratives, or poems, or whatever) months before the classroom event and a motivation for these items to be shared by their authors. Advertising in the community's newspaper helped us get the word out, but because only a small percentage actually read the paper (let alone that particular week's), word cannot reach every willing ear. Once the call is read, what motivates the author to send something in?
If a project encourages authors to find publication, then it ought to offer publication. But who will publish something if nothing is in hand? We presented a promise of possibility which provides hope but little in the way of tangible motivation. Project leaders must gain support from their leadership in order to find funding for a publication.
Collaboration is the key to success in the students' writing, but it is also the key to success for those teachers who involve themselves in service learning. The outside-the-classroom work (for the teachers, not the students) is daunting if you go at it alone.

Debriefing: Telling War Stories Project