Okay, so you may be asking yourself exactly what are the differences in being civic engaged. Well the answer is very simple and it all depends on what it is that you are doing with a local organization. At USF-St. Pete our mission includes being an active member of the local community and creating citizen scholars who are engaged and improve the community.
Ever since I started working/interning/volunteering for the CCE I was made aware of the difference between interning and community service. I thought it was always the same thing. Each campus through out the nation that has a center/office like ours focus in a specific way of civic engagement, whether that is mainly community service through student organizations, internships, or the combination of guided field placements that relate to course curriculum. The latter is what USF St. Pete has decided to focus on and what we at the CCE catalog.
So, what is community service? When one volunteers or does community service you are donating your time to an organization/group out of the goodness of your heart. In colleges/universities student groups and organizations are very active in this form of engagement by sponsoring clothing drives, food drives, book drives, etc. Its something that can be done in a group or individually and its an activity that the local agency usually directs. More often than not you are usually helping out the agency by being involved in a program or activity that they are in charge of. My hat goes off to anyone that takes a bit of their time to volunteer anywhere. While talking to our local community partners –especially now in these tough times– they tell me how just volunteering once a week for three hours is a huge help for them. Imagine if a class or a student group managed to volunteer for three hours a week for a semester? It would be incredible. We have cases of classes and groups that do that at USF. St. Pete every semester. I’d like to send them an e-Jersey Shore style fist pump!
When a student takes a class or takes part in an internship usually they are getting credit for it and it integrates academic study with community service in order to make learning more intentional. If that makes any sense at all. In other words: what you learn in the classroom can be directly applied in everyday scenarios in your field placement. Let’s say you’re studying to be an accountant and you take some level 4000 accounting class that has a service learning component to it in which you prepare taxes for underprivileged individuals; that’s combining the best of both worlds and what we try to catalog at the CCE in order to better help other faculty come up with a way to integrate service learning in their curriculum.
Regardless of what type of involvement that a person chooses to do it helps and you deserve a pat on the back for being incredibly selfless and giving! I wish they still made YooHoo pops so that I could give you one!
The Service Learning vs Community Service by Hits Snooze Twice, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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