Service Learning has the dual focuses of ‘learning to serve’ and ‘learning by serving’. As students head towards leaving school and determining what directions their lives will take, the concept of service becomes highly relevant.
Service in the Senior College is carried out in three main contexts – House, IBDP Creativity, Activity and Service (CAS), and Year 10 Community Service. The development of a service mindset is discussed in many different contexts and integrates with several of the St Andrew’s Cathedral School Character Strengths but clearly with ‘Servant Hearted’.
Houses focus through the year on supporting homeless people through connection with Rough Edges in Darlinghurst; people doing it tough and struggling to make ends meet through the outreach programme of South Sydney Anglican Church; and also with clothing and food drives for Anglicare.
IBDP Creativity, Activity and Service has a mandatory and meaningful service component in which students create and reflect on one or more substantial activities of service.
The Year 10 Community Service Programme broadens the focus. A big component of this is the fundraising, compiling and distribution of food hampers. In 2021, Year 10, with all students on board due to COVID, packed 500 hampers for people struggling to make ends meet at Christmas. Other focuses for Year 10 during Term 4 include Peer Support training, training for engagement with homeless people in face to face contexts, a simulation game – in a small way engaging with a life of poverty, writing cards and creating decorations for residents of aged care facilities, and learning to knit squares for the creation of blankets. In non-COVID years, students head out and physically engage in a variety of contexts.
Students in the Senior College are encouraged to see service as fundamental to the good order of homes, school, society and our world. Service is the outworking of the biblical concept of love and in that, we follow the example of Jesus ‘who came not to be served but to serve’ Matthew 20:28.
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