Volunteer vs. Service Learning

So I have lately been very interested in the trendy nature of volunteering and the connection between helping others and feeling good ourselves. However I crack up at some of the safe ways that we choose to volunteer and how we might sign up to volunteer for 2 hours on a saturday and something always seems to comes up to make us cancel. Anyways I have been writing about how teenagers know that college admissions counselors look for volunteer work and i think about how much I volunteered in high school pretty much so that i would have lots to talk about for my college essay...lame i know. But all of this started to be better understood, or at least i started to think in new ways about why people do flake on volunteer work, why people choose to play it safe, etc. Last night, in a stellar presentation by another art ed student she distinguished volunteering from service learning in a really comprehensive way. I now realize that when I am throwing every kind of service project under the umbrella term volunteer work, I get comfused. She spoke about how volunteering is usually driven by motives of the volunteer not the recipient of the work, its an isolated event, it implies the volunteer is bringing some of their world/agenda to the world/agenda of the recipient. Versus service learning which incorporates a learning component, there is initial research done on the project, it is rooted in educational progress, there are specific aspects of the project identified, there is a community-based approach, and there is a long term commitment. This is such a different act than volunteering! Now I am not at all saying that volunteering is bad, it is extremely wonderful and necessary but I am so excited to see the educational potential of service being defined as whole other term. I love when things get more complex but because of the complexities suddenly things start to make sense!