INTEGRATING SERVICE LEARNING INTO AN UPPER SCHOOL CURRICULUM

Ian Lockey

Background

As a Quaker educator, I find myself called to think deeply about the intersections of an education system still firmly rooted in a historical white supremacist model and the desire for education to be liberatory for our students. The independent school, college preparatory model, however, provides a number of obstacles to our classrooms being liberatory, particularly assumed cultural touchpoints of a Western ‘canon’ that must be covered. My action research project grew out of these perceived tensions.

My Latin classroom is a locus for social justice work, despite the subject being usually associated with descriptions of violent empire and “great men.” The Latin classroom has not traditionally been a space to discuss women, enslaved people, race and ethnicity, colonization, or disability, even though the surviving evidence provides us with abundant resources for such investigations. Historically a so-called ‘Classical’ education was intended to prepare predominantly men for public service in European nations and their colonies; this means the subject is at once behind the times when it comes to engagement with oppressive structures but also incredibly well suited as a space from which to examine and dismantle such structures.

My upper-level classes engage students with questions about gender, sexuality, imperialism, race, ethnicity, ableism, and disability. By studying ancient ideas and thinking critically about the impact Classical reception has had upon the creation of modern, “Western” virtues and social structures, students are asked to question assumptions, critique society, and look at the ancient world anew as a much more complicated collection of societies with various avenues for both oppression and freedom. As part of a desire to put classroom discussions and learning at the service of society, my action research project involves developing a service-learning model that works within my specific classroom settings, but that can serve as a template for other teachers in various disciplines.

Exploration

Since this project is being piloted during the 2023-2024 school year, there have been some successes and some areas that have been changed midway through the year. As I write this, the students have not completed the project either, so the information about the summary presentation is at present aspirational.

I piloted this project with my Latin V students. By Latin V the students have already had a lot of exposure both to textbook and authentic Latin texts, and they have engaged in discussions about the complexities of Classical reception and the ways in which the subject matter has been used to justify such areas as patriarchy, racial hierarchies, imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. As students at a Quaker school, they have had plenty of exposure to social justice work and service, and so introducing a service-learning project in their yearlong course was a natural step.

The project itself is broken down into four areas to ft into the quarter system our school employs. The quarter divisions have blurred over the course of the project, but the basic areas of study and experience have remained the same. Our classes meet three times a week during a typical week, with two 55-minute blocks and one 70-minute block. Since my Latin V students are also studying disability in the ancient and modern worlds this year, the project was initially worked on in every other 70-minute block.

During the frst quarter, students were asked in groups to identify a social justice issue that they were passionate about. At this point, the students did not have to consider the ancient world, except if they selected a topic that had no direct correlation in the past. This group of seniors ended up settling on education and its intersections with gender and class, poverty and access to resources, childbirth and adoption, care for people experiencing mental health crises, and housing insecurity. Students spent time during the first quarter identifying sources, researching their topics in the ancient world, and compiling a basic presentation of the major themes they had identified. In the future, I will compile research materials ahead of time and limit the available topics students can study, because there was not enough time to find available academic articles and do significant research.

In the second quarter, originally students were asked to identify someone doing important work in their area in Philadelphia or the wider United States and to invite them to speak to the class. This way everyone would learn about everyone else’s topics. The idea was that once a speaker had come in to address the students, the group who had invited the speaker would then present a summary of the talk and the ways it intersected with their research. Given interruptions to the schedule during the second quarter, there was not enough time for this in class, and so the students are currently creating podcast interviews and summaries instead. This will bleed into the third quarter, which is the quarter where the students are each asked to complete at least ten hours of service with a local organization. The students in their groups are able to work together at a service location or work at different locations, but each student is responsible for their own ten hours of commitment.

Next Steps

The project will culminate with a presentation by the various groups to their classmates, peers, parents, and service partners. The students will spend the beginning of the fourth quarter creating a large-scale poster inspired by poster presentations at academic conferences covering their research in the ancient world, the topic in the modern work (locally, nationally, and internationally), and the ways in which their service helped deepen their understanding of both areas. Students will be required to prepare and practice a clear fve-minute summary of their work for their audience.

This time around, the project is not officially graded because I strongly believe that service learning should not be completed for a grade. The students will - in the third quarter and at the end of the project - complete a self-evaluation of their work to encourage them to refect deeply on what they have achieved. Upon completion of this project and my own self-refection, I will put together a framework that any upper school educator can use for their classes, one that can be adapted for a variety of schools and budgets. It is my hope that by incorporating projects that call for various modes of learning in one class space, we can encourage students to begin to re-envision education as a focus of the practice of liberation.

IAN LOCKEY

Upper School Latin Teacher & Coordinator of Diversity, Equity, and InclusionFriends Select SchoolPhiladelphia, PA

I have been the Upper School Latin teacher at Friends Select for the past 12 years. I am currently also a lead advisor and the Upper School Coordinator of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Friends Select is my frst high school teaching job, and my time at the school and my engagement with Quaker educational models has been personally transformational. During the past 12 years, I have developed a deep passion for social justice work and for working with and for students to encourage critical engagement with the world around them. This work is done in all aspects of my job from advising to classroom teaching to creating social justice programming, and it is from this that I developed the idea for my action research project.