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23 OCTOBER 2009
NO 1504
Youth volunteering
Student involvement in volunteer activities in the community, often referred to as service-learning, offers exciting opportunities for redirecting youth into positive, productive roles. While the contributions of welladjusted "model" youth in community service are well recognized, we are only beginning to recognize that all young people need and can benefit from such service1.
The foundation of PPC is to teach young people to help one another. Bringing a group to this point is a major achievement – but what then? How can we insure that helping behavior is genuine and that it will transfer outside the peer group? Unless caring values and behavior generalize beyond the PPC group, we only might have taught students how to play a ritualized conning game and created a "greenhouse effect" which is unrelated to the real world. Admittedly, the aspirations of service-learning with troubled youth is ambitious. We are not content to merely neutralize negative peer influence; the goal is to reverse this behavior, making youth an asset to their communities.
If young people are to develop competence and self-esteem, they must experience opportunities to affect the world7. But while youth long for a feeling of importance, "the usual adult approach ... is to build them a new playground or teen-town where they are told to 'go and play some more"' (Combs, cited by Hamacheck)3.
Deprived of opportunities for productivity, shunted into consumptive roles, young people come to learn that their presence makes very little difference in the world. Rotter4 developed the concept of locus of control which refers to the degree to which an individual assumes responsibility for the impact of one's own behavior. Many troubled youth believe that they have little real control over their lives. Their irresponsibility is closely related to their external locus of control (i.e., feelings of being helpless victims, fate, or the whims of powerful others). Involvement in successful experience in service-learning can challenge young people's assumptions that they are worthless and help them develop positive roles6.
As youth transcend themselves, they become committed to persons or causes greater than their individual egos. Service-learning is an antidote to the narcissism, malaise, and antisocial life-styles so common in today's troubled youth. Among the benefits that can accrue from service-learning are these:
enhancing moral development toward the higher levels such as a respect for the dignity of all human beings;
causing others to treat youth as worthy members of the community;
providing ample opportunities to experience mature levels of caring;
offering the opportunity for exposure to positive role models;
reducing the discontinuity and polarization that exists between the two worlds of adults and children.5
A wide range of service-learning projects have been highly successful with PPC groups. Some of these are of short duration, while others are carried on regularly over a period of many months, including: serving as teacher aides at a community day-care center, assisting in Special Olympic events for the handicapped, working with retarded children at a special school, earning money to provide food for a needy family, chopping firewood for the disabled, and visiting shut-in citizens. As Fantini2 has stated, the range of possible service-oriented activities is virtually without limit if educators use a little thought and imagination.
HARRY H. VORRATH AND LARRY K. BRENDTRO
Vorrath, H.H. and Brendtro, L.K.(1985). Positive
Peer Culture (2nd ed.). New York. Aldine de Gruyter. pp. 118-120.
NOTES
1. L. Brendtro and A. Nicholaou, Hooked on Helping, Synergist, 10, 3. pp. 38-41.
2. M. Fantini, (1980). Disciplined Caring, Phi Delta Kappan, 62. pp. 182-184.
3. D. Hamachek, (1965). The Self in Growth, Teaching and Learning. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall.
4. J. Rotter, (1966). Generalized Expectancies for Internal versus External Control of Reinforcement, Psychological Monographs, 80, 1, whole no. 609. pp. 1-28.
5. K. Saurman and R. Nash, (1980). An Antidote to Narcissism, Synergist, 9, 1. pp. 15-18.
6. S. Thompson, (1980). A Chance to Change, Synergist, 9, 2. pp. 2-5.
7. R. White, (1971). The Urge towards Competence,
American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 25. pp. 271-274.
