Civic engagement is a fast growing trend in higher education. The basic concept involves getting college students involved in their communities through either individual service or collective action toward the resolution of a need seen in their community or on campus. It's closely related to the concept of Service-Learning, a style of learning where students' lessons revolve around service to their community.  Service-Learning is more than just community service or volunteerism. Service-Learning allows educators to create learning objectives that center around service-oriented coursework. This type of education is much more common in higher grades and less prevalent in early childhood education. Part of my mission in starting Epiphany was to change that. I truly believe that preschool and kindergarden students can take active meaningful roles in their community. Too often young children are kept away from the world and as a result we have a world that is intolerant of children and the laughter, play, and curious questioning that is childhood. I think the world has as much to learn from children as children do from it, so we go out at much as we can to explore.

Service-Learning in early childhood often just means getting them out there. For students to be truly engaged they need to first be cognizant of their community. They need to know how it works. That's why we visited our Fire Station back in October. Our was a step toward them understanding the needs of the community we live in and a step toward the students becoming engaged in the future. 

A few days ago I posted about our hike up Caves Crater. We had been learning about animals during this trip and the children decided they wanted to participate in two acts of service on the hike. First, they wanted to make sure there was food for the animals through the tough high-desert winter conditions. So we made pine cone bird feeders and hung them around the forest.

Through this simple activity, they learned about the eating habit of birds, problem solved the issue of "leaving no trace" so that our feeders weren't adding to the litter we've seen, and about the natural cycle of food scarcity in winter months for anyone that doesn't have  a grocery store that ships food into their community. 

The next Service-Learning activity we engaged in involved the concern students had for animals and the litter they would encounter in their environment. I asked the students why it mattered and here are some of the responses that came from our planning conversation:

"They don't know what it is and could get scared if they see it"
"They might think it's food and eat it and it would make them sick"
"It makes their homes dirty, they live in the grass and trees"

On our trip to the Summit we played a good amount, but we had other goals besides reaching the top. We planned to feed the birds and clean up their homes and that's what we did on our climb up. When we saw trash, any  play would halt as one child would announce to the rest "I see garbage!".  They would all rush over, call me to bring the bag and we would pick it up. 

Once they were sure that the litter was safe in my trash bag, play would immediately commence. Often times the trash pickup became part of their space mission and would be incorporated into their play without missing a beat.
"Roger, I see garbage on the moon", "Copy that, let's fly over and pick it up!".  How much more meaningful can play get?

 We always make time to reflect on our service. How did we help? Why did we help? Did we really help? What else can we do?  Sometimes this is done by a lunchtime conversation, other times through acting out scenarios in our pretend play or building with blocks, but we always reflect and connect it to what we've been doing at school. It's all connected and it should be. We don't exist alone and we shouldn't. We are all important parts of this community.  We all belong, we all make a difference in some way,  especially the kids.