Service Learning Is a Pathway to Authority and Understanding

Wayne M. Tanna, JD, LL.M.
Professor of Accounting
NCAA Compliance Officer                      
Pre-Law Advisor
Chaminade University of Honolulu             
Email:  wtanna@chaminade.edu

Since I started teaching at Chaminade University in 1992, I have incorporated service learning into a number of my courses. My definition and adaptation of service learning, as used on Chaminade University’s website (http://www.chaminade.edu/serviceLearning), reads as follows:

           Service learning is a method of learning through active participation in thoughtfully            organized service conducted in and meeting the needs of the community.  Service learning            is integrated into and enhances the curriculum.  It includes structured time for reflection and            helps to foster civic and corporate responsibility.  As pedagogy, service learning emerges            from experiential learning theory and encourages active student involvement in the learning            process.

The use of service learning as a method of teaching stems from the idea that experiential learning activities that engage the learner in the phenomena being studied greatly enhances the learning environment.  It follows from the old Chinese proverb, “Tell me, and I will forget; show me, and I may remember; involve me, and I will understand.” It also follows from the Hawaiian proverb “A‘ ohe pau ka ‘ike i ka halau ho‘okaki,” or “one can learn from many sources.”  These words have critical salience for modern educators.

Service learning allows for the effective utilization of the community as an environment for learning.  It also creates other positive factors.  Foremost among these factors is the effect of increasing the student’s awareness of his/her own civic and social responsibility.  Our students are our future leaders.  They need to become aware that a democratic society is dependent upon the presence of an informed, active, and caring citizenry.

Addressing the Issue of Homelessness

Homelessness has become a major social issue in Hawaii in recent months.  As a result, there has been greater attention focused in the local media as well as on campus on the issue of homelessness.  As was the case after Hurricane Katrina, students organized various relief efforts and contributed to those in need.  But the real issue is poverty and the simple solution to homelessness is to get people into housing.  But that is asking for a lot, and several of us, students and teachers alike, feel that there is nothing we can do at so lofty a level of engagement.  However, maybe we already have the mechanisms in place to do something in our curriculum, and the resources we need may already exist in our classrooms.  We just need to think about things a little differently.

But how do we approach this issue of helping and housing the homeless?  One of the approaches I am suggesting is to ask our students.  One of my former students offered this reflection on the idea of helping the homeless through tax services:

           “I must admit when I first heard that the assignment was to help the homeless and people            on welfare with tax services, I thought of this as a somewhat incongruous combination.             Taxes and homeless just did not seem compatible.  I certainly never spoke of the two in            the same sentence . . . How does all of this relate to taxes?  If I had been asked that            question prior to taking the class (Corporate and Partnership Tax) and working with the            program, I would have been hard pressed to find an answer.”

I am positive that encouraging this type of inquisitive exploration in almost any class will lead to great discussion and analysis of the issue you want to address.  All it takes is a little work on the part of the teacher to guide the students.  Students can then come up with their own answers, as mine did, to the question that she herself raised when she asked, “How does all of this relate to taxes?”: 

           “After attending Chaminade’s first Saturday meeting with representatives from those            agencies offering services to [homeless or similar] clients, I began to have a clearer            understanding of the relationship [between taxes and the homeless].  It began to sink in that            there are people out there in the community who can’t afford shelter and are on welfare            that might also need to file tax returns.  Some people who receive welfare are now being            required to work and others may receive other taxable support.  Others may work and            earn income but still be entitled to food stamps, and others might just be entitled to tax            credits.”

The vehicles we use to assist our community are tax credits.  The two credits we focus on are the earned income tax credit (EITC) and child tax credit (CTC).  Since most, including my students, are unaware of these credits and how they assist the working poor in lifting themselves out of poverty, the following is a brief description of the EITC.

Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

The EITC was put into the federal tax code in 1974.  It was originally intended to mitigate the effects on the working poor of the social security/payroll taxes.  Over the years it has become the largest and most successful anti-poverty program created by the federal government.  The EITC has been credited with moving more single parents into the work force than any other government program.  The EITC currently pays to working poor families about $40 billion a year (this is an amount greater than Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and Food Stamps combined).  For 2006, depending on earned income, the credit can be as much as $4,536 and is fully refundable to low wage workers in the United States.  The EITC is credited with lifting over 5 million Americans above the poverty line each year.  Of these five million Americans over half are children).  While the EITC is a great benefit to the working poor, it is not easy to calculate.  The full version of the instructions is over 90 pages in length.  The short form of the instructions is still over nine pages.  This results in an estimated 15 - 20 percent of the eligible families not applying for the credit.  This is where service learning and my students come in as a means to move families out of poverty and homelessness.

Service Learning

Service learning is a method of “thinking outside of the box” of traditional education, as well as a means of physically taking the entire classroom outside of the “four walls” of the University.  For example, the students in my tax courses accompany me to homeless shelters in our community to assist the residents there with their income taxes.  During these “excursions,” the students actually prepare tax returns.  Students interview the clients to find out all of the legally required facts to complete the tax returns.  When a student has a question, he or she comes to me for assistance, just as the student would do in class.  However, here we work on the answers together in order to help others in need.

In this setting, I, as the instructor, continue my role as the teacher, but the students function more as associates working with me on real-life cases.  The end result is not only that questions are answered but, also, through this joint effort, real-life problems are resolved.  The students develop critical thinking skills and engage in self-directed learning and hands-on activities while helping others.  I, as the instructor, am able to observe and instruct the students in real-life settings, helping real-life people rather than using textbook based case studies.  With experiential learning, I am also able to expand on teaching options and styles that may not otherwise be available in a traditional classroom.  The union of classroom theory and real world practice encourages problem solving, independent inquiry and thought, creative thinking and resourcefulness.

The project I am speaking of has been recognized as a national best practice by the National Community Tax Coalition for its outreach to homeless populations and for university-community engagement by the Council of Independent Colleges http://www.cic.edu/projects_services/epe/chaminade.asp.  For tax year 2005, the community coalition that this project has helped to create assisted the working poor in Honolulu in obtaining over $1.1 million in refunds and credits and further provided financial literacy programs to many of the families that received these tax refunds and credits.

The true power and effect of the use of service learning in teaching comes from the element of “reflection.”  Before, during, and after the project, students are required to engage in the process of critical reflection.  One of the outcomes of reflection is that students are often challenged to do something they’re not used to doing.  As a result, what often happens is that students come to see things in a different way and are better able to analyze an issue or get something out of it that they may not have gotten out of it otherwise.

As a result of their participation in service learning, I find that my students feel they are better able to function in the academic and technical areas they are studying.  The students have a positive feeling about themselves and their abilities.  However, it is the awakening of a greater awareness of the social problems and the resulting development of a growing sense of responsibility to do something about the community’s problems that is the most striking result of the service learning experience. 

Of course, it does not hurt for the teacher to have been doing this kind of work prior to introducing it into the curriculum.  On top of that, it does not hurt to get these types of student reflections out to the public, garnering some positive press to emphasize the success of your service learning project.  Once in a while you may get lucky, as we did, and have a local or national media outlet pick up on and highlight your work.  If you have been doing a service learning project on a sustained basis, you will create your own luck, as we have.   My students and I have been featured in local media, which confirms that we are making a difference (for an example see http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2003/Apr/04/ln/ln07a.html).

Conclusion

Seeing things from a different perspective, students come away feeling more confident, compassionate, and less prejudiced, and they develop a deeper commitment to active citizenship.  The Samoan culture has a concept known as “tautua” or “service”, and a Samoan proverb states “O le ala i ‘le pule le tautua,” which means, “the path to authority is through service.”  The use of service learning in my courses has and will continue to have an effect on my students, on me, on my institution, and on my community and its perception of my institution.  I know my students have seen what they are capable of doing to address a major social issue as over the years we have assisted many families to transition out of homeless shelters and into long-term rental homes of their own. 

I conclude with some more reflections from my service learning students:
 
           “Overall, I thought this was a great learning experience…”

           “I learned a great deal about myself and that society (legislation) can be very unfair            or cause negative effects to those of low-income or who are homeless.”

           “I understand that the stereotypes I had before starting this project were completely            wrong.”

           “It is not fair to judge people based on what others say.  Most times it is wrong to            pass judgment on a group of people.”

           “It is our job as citizens of this society to take charge and give a hand in changing            this society into a positive one.”

           “I have learned that giving help no matter how big or how small is better than giving            no help at all.”

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