“Service Learning” project in Russia

September 2005 saw the start of a Service Learning project for secondary school pupils in . The project aims to develop an academic course on Service Learning, including theory and practice, that will prepare school pupils aged 14 upwards for involvement in activities that will benefit their community. The course will emphasise active learning, with lessons drawn from experience.

This project is an experiment, in which staff of the Sozidanie Foundation and other experts are taking take a foreign programme, adapting and translating it to make it relevant to Russia, and producing a course of nine lessons in Service Learning. It is intended to disseminate effective teaching methods of civic education, linking schools directly to young people’s service in the community.

Sozidanie Foundation, together with the Centre for the Development of Volunteering in Russia, are piloting this project, which is supported by a grant from the US Embassy’s Committee for Democracy, in ten schools in five Russian regions: Saransk (in Mordovia), Tver, Vladimir, Samara and in Elabug (in Tartarstan). Altogether, about 400 school pupils will be involved.

A project launch seminar was held in at the end of October, attended by school administrators, teachers, school students from all the regions covered by the project and NGO representatives. Elena Zaitseva, facilitator at the seminar, explained how to incorporate course materials into students’ academic programmes, including practical work during lesson times. Seminar participants will now seek to implement the course’s methods and lessons in the curriculi of their own schools and colleges, in consultation with school authorities, teachers and colleagues. It is hoped that the first adapted courses will run for students from January or February 2006, once a week, taking them through the period of Global Youth Service Day and the Spring Week of Action (21 – 29 April 2006).

For the future, there are plans to publish 1,000 course textbooks of the adapted “Nine Lessons of Service Learning”, including examples of Russian students’ own social projects. This could be distributed in different regions of , so that people as yet unconnected with the project can use the lessons for themselves, in their own educational and social contexts.

Contact: Lena Zakharova

Sozidanie Foundation

Phone / fax: (+7 095) 291 2004

Email: sozidanie@co.ru

www.fondsozidanie.ru