The following article was first published in the fall '98 issue of ISANNEWS, the newsletter of the Independent Schools Association of Northern New England, it appears here with permission in a slightly edited version.

"Think globally. Act locally." At Thetford Academy, this prescription for change has gone beyond bumper-sticker sentiment. Over eight years, our service learning program has grown from a single project connecting two schools in our small Vermont town, to an international aid effort with links around the world. As a result, students now think in two directions, seeking connections between the home community and the global community. They're also committed to action in both arenas. Whether they're working with the kindergarten around the corner or an orphanage in Haiti, they believe they can make a difference in the world; that's the point of service. They also expect their experience to make a difference in them. They know learning through service will be some of the most powerful learning they do here. As educators, we've developed a deep respect for this power, and have sought to make service learning a central component of the curriculum. The kids have shown us the principles that matter in this work. As the program burgeons, we keep returning to those fundamentals, which ground both global and local action in sound educational practices.

Kindergarten Partners It all began, eight years ago, in conversations on the soccer sidelines. The soccer moms were teachers: Barb Sorenson worked with seniors in English courses at the Academy, and Joanna Waldman with kindergartners at nearby Thetford Elementary School. Both saw their students struggling with transitions, as the teenagers prepared to leave school for the adult world and the young children adjusted to school entrance. This recognition of a common experience led Barb and Joanna to wonder whether they should get their kids together.

Service learning is not just a set of engaging activities students carry out; it's also something they can design, organize, and lead themselves.

The result, as soccer season wound down and second-semester planning began, was Kindergarten Partners, a project that paired two dozen high schoolers and kindergartners as "buddies" in weekly arts and literacy activities. Seeking funds for supplies, the teachers turned to Academy Head of School Martha Rich, who helped them apply for a small seed grant from the Vermont Learn and Serve Initiative. The significance of this award proved to be far greater than its modest cash value. By framing the Kindergarten Partners project in the service learning model, we were on our way to discovering the principles that would make it the template for a whole new approach to community-based education in our schools.

Defining the Principles After the second project year, we analyzed student course evaluations and some encouraging evidence of success: better attendance rates and improved school performance for high-risk teen participants, greater confidence and improved literacy readiness for high-risk kindergartners. We'd also seen mutual joy as the buddies greeted each other in school or at the village store; these were genuine friends. We now felt ready to define the essential elements of the project, the things that had made it work. We later saw how closely our "nine principles" aligned with national service learning guidelines, an indication that our own progress from practice to theory echoed a far more substantial body of field-based research. In any case, our experience to that point had convinced us that successful community service learning requires:

Integration with Curriculum Over the past five years, we've stuck by these principles. We've resisted, for instance, service initiatives with no link to curriculum, and teacher-led projects that give students only a minor role in design and evaluation. As we've promoted serious attention to the model's components, service learning in Thetford has expanded to encompass over twenty school-community partnerships, integrated with coursework at every level. Further grant funding through Vermont's Learn and Serve America Programa $30,000 award over a three-year periodsupported a local mini-grant fund along with summer training institutes for teachers and community members; we designed and conducted this training ourselves to meet local needs, seeking inspiration and assistance from consultants in the growing national network of service learning advocates. (Sheila Bailey of the Vermont State Department of Education in Montpelier and Cynthia Parsons of SerVermont in Chester were particularly important partners.) As the service learning model took hold here, we saw applications in subjects ranging from chemistry to drama to social studies to horticulture, linking students with senior citizens' groups, garden clubs, town historical societies, recreation committees, recycling centers, and nursing homes, as well as each other's classrooms across the grades.

K-Partners Now A Full-Credit Elective Our flagship project, Kindergarten Partners, has evolved meanwhile into a full-credit elective course, integrating child development studies with work to meet language, arts, and service standards. The course is consistently over-enrolled, pointing to a development we couldn't have predicted at the outset: service learning has become "cool." Its growing appeal to students has something to do with the visible results, the products and performances and relationships it creates, but there's another powerful attraction. Service learning is not just a set of engaging activities students carry out; it's also something they can design, organize, and lead themselves.

We see mounting evidence that students' personal sense of agency increases given the right conditions. More students are designing and organizing their own independent projects, with the kind of energy, creativity, and idealism only youth can mobilize.

Operation Day's Work The clearest example of this is our latest project, which has moved service learning to a new level. Thetford Academy is serving this year as one of six pilot sites in the U.S. for establishing "Operation Day's Work," a program sponsored by the U.S. Agency of International Development and the Norwegian Consulate. The program promotes global awareness, youth leadership, and school-to-work experience by engaging students in study and fund raising for aid to developing nations. Its highly successful 30-year history in Scandinavia has inspired the U.S. adaptation plan.

Student-Led Interdisciplinary Course After attending a national planning conference last spring, Academy students recommended establishing an interdisciplinary course devoted to the project's implementation here, and recruited nearly thirty participants as well as a faculty mentor, Steve Niederhauser. They also promoted the U.S. program's selection of Haiti as the developing-nation partner for 1998-99. (That selection itself arose from a service learning idea in one of Barb Sorenson's classes, where students had been moved by a newspaper account of Rainbow House, an orphanage in Port-au-Prince for children of AIDS victims.) This fall, the Day's Work student leaders are organizing both public education and school-based study of Haiti, as well as preparation for the day of fund raising service work next May; their aim is to involve all 385 students at the Academy in that effort. In the wake of Hurricane Georges, they've added an immediate drive for contributions to emergency relief.

Continuing International Collaboration The international dimension of service learning has found other expressions as well. Collaborating with French teacher Karen Heinzmann and her sophomore French II students, the Kindergarten Partners class has established communication with Rainbow House. The Thetford children and their high school buddies now focus on Haitian folklore and culture in the reading, writing, artwork, and music they do together; the pictures, quilts, books and tapes they're making are for children in Port-au-Prince, as well as for each other.

In learning experiences like this, "meaningful work with clear goals" becomes focused on a specific intersection of the local and global communities. The challenge to maintain "small, intensive, and manageable scale"not to take on more than we can handle responsiblyassumes a whole new dimension as well. Dr. Robert Belenky, a Vermont-based child psychologist who works with homeless children in Russia and Haiti, has given us wise counsel about this. "When you set out to help someone," he told students recently, "you start by making friends." This focus on a reciprocal relationship, on honoring others' humanity and dignity instead of their status as victims, is at the heart of the service learning concept. We gave up long ago trying to distinguish between the "servers and servees" in our projects; it was clear that all participants both gave and received benefits. Expanding this insight to an international scale can only work if the global somehow remains local, in connections that redefine our sense of both terms.

"When you set out to help someone...you start by making friends."

Recently, a group of Academy students expressed their commitment to this idea in a grant proposal narrative. Their words bear witness to the highest aims of service learning: "We want to gain enough knowledge to educate ourselves and others to become global citizens. We want to make a difference for ourselves and others, in a real project on behalf of children oppressed by poverty, lack of education, and AIDS. Through this project we hope to become friends and have a positive experience.

Goals:

Through this experience we hope to become friends and to initiate an ongoing relationship which Thetford Academy will continue throughout the years."