Maryland Student Service Alliance

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Service-Learning Best Practices Project Guide

for the American Red Cross School Chest Initiative: Maryland to Kenya

Thank you for choosing to help students in countries struck by disaster. This School Chest Initiative can be a great service-learning experience for your group. Service-learning is a method of experiential education that links academic learning with student service that benefits the community. The Maryland Student Service Alliance, in partnership with the American Red Cross, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Governor's Office on Service and Volunteerism, and the YMCA of Central Maryland, offers you the following project guide to help you prepare for, carry out, and reflect on this project. This project guide follows Maryland's Seven Best Practices for Service-Learning in an effort to help you craft a meaningful, academically and globally relevant, and engaging project.

1. Meet a recognized community need

Explore with students what human, education, environmental, or public safety need(s) the School Chest Initiative will meet. To learn more about Kenya and the disaster impacting citizens there, visit the Kenya Web and All Africa websites.

2. Achieve curricular objectives through service-learning

Examine your course or team goals, outcomes, and indicators to identify ways to integrate the School Chest Initiative into classroom lessons. The Guiding Questions and Activities handout can get you started. Does this connect to geography or science outcomes? Could you connect the collection activity to math indicators? Could you have students engage in reading, writing or researching about the project in language arts or social studies?

3. Reflect throughout service-learning experience

Assist students to engage in creative and meaningful reflection strategies by creating a video or photo documentary of the project, creating artwork or poetry to express what they have learned through the project and how they felt about it, or reading articles and stories related to the topic and discussing them. Hold classroom discussions on the project periodically to reflect. Reflection questions could include: How will this project impact the lives of children in Kenya? Do we have an obligation to help others who are in need? What are you learning through this project? Imagine that you have survived a natural and/or human disaster and someone from far away tried to help you… Refer to the Reflection Ideas for additional possibilities.

4. Develop student responsibility

As an adult sponsor of this project, your role should be to help students discover how to organize and execute the School Chest Initiative. Encourage students to be creative and take leadership and ownership of the project. You might consider having students' form various committees to work on different parts of the project. For example, they could conduct outreach to the community to collect donations for citizens and business.

5. Establish community partnerships

Work with students to identify partners, in addition to the American Red Cross, who could provide information or resources for the project. Maybe a student or their family has a connection to Kenya and you can arrange for a guest speaker. Students could also solicit local businesses for donations.

6. Plan ahead for service-learning

Review your curriculum to look for possible links to this project. Peruse the Guiding Questions and Activities resource to stimulate your thinking of how to link the project to your curriculum.

7. Equip students with knowledge and skills

Students need to be prepared to engage in the project in two ways: Students should spend time exploring the concepts of citizenship, civic duty, and responsibility. Students should be aware that the project they are about to engage in is a service-learning project that will address a very real global-community need while helping students develop academic and personal knowledge and skills at the same time. Students should develop an understanding and appreciation of Kenya (refer to Guiding Questions and Activities and Kenya websites for assistance), disaster, international relief, as well as teamwork and project execution skills.