1) The document discusses incorporating service learning into traditional curriculum to help students make the local-global connection. It provides tips on curriculum integration and examples linking subjects like biology and soil degradation to global issues. 2) Students would participate in activities like visiting farms to understand soil impacts and have policy discussions. The goal is for students to think globally and see their role in addressing issues. 3) Incorporating service learning can help students develop skills like critical thinking and caring for others while understanding how local actions and policies have far-reaching global effects.

2. Making the Local-Global
Connection through
Curriculum-Integrated Service
Learning
 What does this mean?
 And why should you
incorporate this concept into
your classes you teach?
2

3. The Problem Defined
• You are a far-sighted teacher or school
administrator. You want to introduce
service learning into your traditional
curriculum
• Problem: Your colleagues don’t fully get it.
What do you do?
• Here are some tips on what to do, along
with selections of suggested material that
you could actually use as a template for
creating a curriculum-integrated service
learning program in your school 3

4. What is Service Learning, and
What are its Goals?
•First, what Service Learning is not:
•It is not just an extracurricular afterthought,
or a trendy “add-on” during one’s college or
high school years—to be conveniently
forgotten once your students enter the “real”
world
•It is not a mere resume builder designed to
make them look good as they try to get to
the next level in life
4

5. Service Learning is …
• An activity that will change both your students as well as
those they will be serving
• An involvement that will help prepare them to become well-
rounded decision-makers capable of working across cultural
lines
• An engagement that will enable them to develop a sense of
global citizenship which will serve them as a lifelong
compass
• A tool that will equip them to lead not just from the top-
down but from the bottom up, in whatever area of public
life they enter
• An experience that will help them see the world in
characteristically global ways, yet think and act locally
• An involvement that should alter them enough that it
becomes a permanent part of their knowledge base—
indeed, of their very selves—the rest of their lives
5

6. Tips: What To Do
• One: Develop and position your material so
it helps your students to make the local-
global connection. Why, and what’s that?
• You need to put service learning in a larger
picture that connects what is going on in
their local neighborhood with what is
occurring globally. In give local action a
global significance.
• Second, it helps them to see that what they
choose to do or don’t do has far-reaching
effects.
• Similarly, choices made on the other side of
the world affect us here 6

7. • The next set of slides discuss how to
organize Community Service Learning
around a theme in your school curriculum
• For example: studying soil in AP Biology, or
water in Geography, or poverty in Social
Studies.
7

8. What are the Takeaways?
• First, service learning offers students priceless
lessons that no textbook could ever teach them.
Example: that the world’s resource management
problems, while large, are not insurmountable
• Second, your students will learn, in practical vivid
ways, that local-global resource problems like soil
degradation, are avoidable, but tackling them
requires working simultaneously on several
fronts, because these fronts are interlinked and
intertwined
• This is what is going to help them 15 years from
now, when they are junior policymakers or
company executives
• Globalize their minds now, and you set them for
life 8

9. Curriculum integration
Subject: Biology
Topic: The physical environment
Sub-topic: Soil
(Alternative subjects: Social Studies and
Geography)
The Strategy:
While using your existing science
syllabus, you can extend your lessons
beyond the classroom by linking the subject
to broader issues occurring either in the
United States or the rest of the world 9

10.  Example: After studying soil, lead a discussion
on the impact of soil on our day-to-day lives.
We are facing a major dilemma as the world
continues to lose its soil at an alarming rate.
 The food they ate in the cafeteria most likely
partly came from soil that is being threatened
with depletion, erosion and compaction—often
not far from where the students live.
 The idea is get students to start looking at soil
as something other than DIRT. It is a life
source.
 Encourage your students to research hardy
crops that be grown in relatively poor
soil, without the use of chemicals or fertilizers.
10

11. Project-linked activities
They could identify farming methods that improve
soil condition. For example, crop rotation.
Soil Fertility: How to increase soil fertility be
increased without artificial fertilizers
Soil management: Study soil erosion --- how to
reduce soil erosion
Some countries, like Haiti, have just about
completely lost their soil.
Result: They can hardly feed themselves today.
Question: What policy interventions should the
rest of the rich world adopt to try to help them
restore their soil? 11

12. Soil: Making the Local-Global
Connection
 Question: Why is soil erosion both a local and a
global issue?
 Fact: The whole world depends on soil. And
agricultural trade links us even further.
 Rich and poor countries alike are engaging in
practices that are accelerating soil degradation
 In the US, for example, the use of heavy farm
machinery compacts the soil, essentially crushing
its micro-structure and make it less and less
usable.
 In other countries, lack of food leads to
overgrazing. Lack of crop rotation and global
warming add to soil degradation 12

13.  In just the past four decades, soil erosion
has destroyed almost one-third of all the
fertile land in the world.
 When soil is destroyed, forests disappear.
From the Amazon to Indonesia to East
Africa, rain forests and farmland are
disappearing at an alarming rate
 What responses can your students formulate
to these soil-related issues?
 Lead them in a role-play simulating a debate
in the House of Congress about US farming
practices, or a session in the United Nations
on the future of the global environment 13

14. A Vicious Cycle of Interconnected
Events
 Carbon emissions in the West and in China create
global warming through greenhouse effects ...
 which leads to climate change …
 which triggers severe droughts, floods, and
mudslides ...
 which in turn cause soil erosion …
 which leads to over-cultivation of existing
farmland …
 which hastens soil degradation by exhausting the
nutrient-rich soil …
 which results in declining harvests and food
shortages
14

15. Further Sobering Facts
 Ecologists say 10 percent of a country’s terrain
should be covered by forest. But in most
countries, the forest cover is now less than two
percent.
 Many of us may not be feeling it now, but the world
is losing its ability to feed itself—through
erosion, soil
degradation, deforestation, desertification, and
drought driven by climate change.
15

16. “With eight billion people, we're going to have to start
getting interested in soil. We’re simply not going to be
able to keep treating it like dirt.”
Geologist and author David R. Montgomery, in
Charles C. Mann, “Our Good Earth,” National
Geographic, September 2008
16

17. Haiti: Many countries have lost their soil and thus the means
to feed themselves.
Source: National Geographic Magazine September 2008
17

18. Service Learning: Food Security
 We can all relate to food. So food security
presents powerful lessons that make it an
ideal Service Learning local-global theme
illustrating the centrality of soil and its role
in life.
 Take your students on a trip to visit and
work a large agribusiness farm to
understand the impact of big
machinery, and how it is compacting and
degrading the soil beneath our feet.
18

19. A greenhouse
Source:
Sakario, Flickr
19

20. Strategic Learning Goals
 The aim is to connect textbook learning to
the real world
 Evidence shows that the most effective
learning occurs when students draw on all
their faculties to interact concretely with
their surroundings— rural or urban, local or
abroad—while engaging farmer, immigrant
workers, and other local stakeholders in
active conversation
20

21. The Educational Benefits
 A farm visit will give your students
opportunities to use their analytical and
conversational skills in real-life situations
that extend beyond the walls of their
classroom, and into the community
 Second, it will foster a sense of caring for
others and for the globe as they engage in
trench digging, bed preparation, planting of
seedlings, and cultivation of nurseries
21

22. A group of high school students on a trip to work on an organic farm in
Tacoma, Washington
Source: Voluntourists, Flickr
22

23. “We both did the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Montana the year after we
graduated from St. Joe's. Kristen worked part-time at the Missoula Food
Bank and part-time with the children's program at the YWCA shelter. Mary
worked as a case manager at the YWCA shelter.”
Source: Voluntourists, Flickr

24. The Policy Angle: How and Why
Do Policies Go Wrong?
 Face it. Most urban students are not going to
grow up to be farmers or even soil scientists.
 Their point of contact with soil issues is likely
to occur from decision-making positions as
policymakers, government
workers, company managers, and voters
 Result: It’s important to get them to think
from the policy angle
 They need to understand why policies go
wrong, and why wrong policies are made in
the first place. So… 24

25. Wrong-headed Policies: How
Can the World Fix Them?
 What policies can be put in place to ban or
reduce the use of pesticides or fertilizers that
making soil toxic?
 Since the Kyoto Environmental Agreement
failed, what policies can be into place to curb the
negative effects of climate change which are
damaging the soil and leading to low crop yields
and soil erosion?
 Many commercial farmers in developed countries
use heavy machinery because they say they
can’t afford the costs of hiring a lot of workers
to do what one big combine harvester can do.
So they’d rather damage the soil. Who is right?25

26. The Policy Angle, continued
• Question: Should governments offer
incentives that bring in more seasonal
migrants to work on farms, thus encouraging
big-business farmers to use more labor and
less machinery?
• Who are the world’s biggest polluters of
air, soil and water?
• If you were in the Senate or at the UN, what
policies would you try to introduce to
discourage or penalize major polluters?
• Which do you think works better:
Penalties, or education?
26

27. OUTCOMES: What Can You Expect
from a Well-Designed, Curriculum-
Linked Service Learning Program?
You should be able to teach your students to…
• Think and act both globally and locally
• Develop a working vocabulary around global
issues, and place service learning in an expanded
conceptual framework that makes sense of both local
and world events
• Make the global-local connection and grasp how global
developments affect us here, and vice versa
• See themselves as transformative agents beginning to
nurture a commitment to global advocacy
• Start to prepare themselves to become well-
rounded, far-sighted decision makers capable of
working across cultural lines
27

28. OUTCOMES: What Can You Expect from a Well-
Designed Service Learning Program? Continued
You should be able to teach your students to…
• Select local community service projects and
understand how they link to global issues
• Gain an understanding of global issues that goes
beyond conventional isolated initiatives
• Understand specific world regions, the
economic, justice and environment challenges
they face, and the forces that affect their life
choices and outcomes
• Build an information and support network with
other student allies at other schools, and with
NGOs that are committed to local-global issues
through service learning 28