Service Teaches Powerful Lessons
Service learning at Nashoba Brooks involves every student and teacher in projects that are meaningful, age-appropriate, and tied to the curriculum. A variety of service opportunities allows everyone to learn the joy of helping others and to gain awareness of the world around us. Students engage in both basic types of service: direct help, such as creating coloring books for pediatric hospital patients and reading to Head Start children; and indirect help, such as fund raising for a guide-dog program, packaging for the Salvation Army, and, this past year, a walk to support Sudanese students and relief for tsunami victims.
In addition to individual projects, seventh and eighth graders participate in an annual “Day of Service.” In spring, 2005, Nashoba Brooks hosted the regional NCISR (National Center for Independent School Renewal) Conference, the theme of which was “From Good Deeds to Service Learning.”
One long-time, ongoing project is with Gaining Ground, a Concord organization that grows organic produce for Boston-area meal programs and shelters. Gaining Ground has been in operation for over ten years, and Nashoba Brooks has been involved with its programs practically every step of the way. Upper grades teacher Polly Vanasse, who initiated the school’s involvement with Gaining Ground, discusses what helps make this a service learning project, linked to the curriculum as well as to character education:
“Gaining Ground was appealing on so many levels. We were doing community service, we were learning first-hand about foods that many of us had previously seen only in supermarket packages, and we were learning about issues of hunger and homelessness. And once the project moved to the Old Manse garden space, the appeal of Gaining Ground grew to yet another level. That one-half-acre plot, a reproduction of the kitchen garden that Henry David Thoreau planted as a wedding present for the Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne in 1842, offered a perfect tie-in with the school’s ‘Discovering Our Place’ journaling curriculum. Some of my upper grades colleagues and I developed the unit after attending a workshop at the Thoreau Institute on how to incorporate journaling into the science and humanities. After spending time with our students at Walden Pond, we began adopting plots of land to study—which we did over time, in slow motion, with Thoreau’s keen, contemplative eye. What could have been more appropriate than to have hands in the same spot of earth that the Man of Concord himself had tilled, seeded, and nurtured?
“Our students began to grow heirloom tomatoes at the Old Manse in 1998, after learning about seed preservation from Gaining Ground’s Garden Coordinator. There are seed conservancies that have preserved varieties from earlier centuries, and it seemed like a great idea to continue that tradition. Every year, eighth graders have harvested tomatoes during the fall and saved seeds from several varieties. In the spring, seventh graders plant and tend the seedlings, raising plants to take to the garden in late May.
“The garden in May is a pretty unremarkable thing, a reminder of our fragile connection to the land where we grow our food. The day the girls transplant their seedlings, they—the plants—bend over and cry. We’ve had students who come by with their parents the next day to see if their seedlings made it through the night.
“But when we go to the garden to harvest in the fall, we see the riot of color; tomatoes the size of cantaloupes. The girls know that there will be thousands of pounds of vegetables—over 25 thousand, in fact, from both gardens—going to the pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters. Harvesting is powerful. Planting is powerful. Our students have learned to have ‘faith in a seed,’ as Thoreau would say. And I’ve learned to have faith in them. Gardening is a potent metaphor for life.”
