| Although educators are not in agreement about how students learn best, considerable attention in the past decade has focused on student-centered or learner-directed kinds of learning. A common element of all these pedagogies was to provide students with more direct hands-on experience with course work. In order to accomplish this task, service learning emerged in many disciplines, blending classroom knowledge with community experience. However, there have been limited qualitative studies on the impact of service learning and composition. The purpose of my study was to describe how service learning experiences impacted students' social awareness and civic engagement as they served the homeless, providing writing students with real situations and real audiences to dialogue with, reflect on, and write about what they had read and researched about homelessness.; Using hermeneutic phenomenology as a methodology, this study was comprised of 20 students from several English Composition courses and how they interpreted their lived experiences with the homeless. Journal questions were proposed under the constructs of social awareness and civic engagement and for each recursive phase of Delve, Mintz, and Stewart's (1990) student development model that identified the five phases of involvement in service learning: exploration, clarification, realization, activation, and internalization.; Findings indicated that, as service learners became more socially aware of issues such as poverty, social injustices, and homelessness, they often experienced a transformation of preconceived biases and judgments into a shared community of civically involved participants. Themes that emerged from students' lived experience were as follows: discovering the plight of the homeless, becoming more socially aware of preconceived biases and judgments, transforming experiences, personally identifying with the problems of the homeless, and growing more civic-minded on behalf of the homeless. Data was interpreted and analyzed using Delve et al.'s model and other authors who have written about the benefits of service learning. The evidence led to a more holistic understanding of humanity with regard to social awareness and civic engagement. |
