The documentation of the Service Learning practice in adult training laboratories as a reflection tool on the educational experience

Abstract

As part of the PON Piccole Scuole adult training workshop on Service Learning (SL) pedagogical approach, eleven documentation notebooks on teaching practices produced by participants have been analyzed. The class was part of a broader training course set up by Indire in March 2019, addressed to all Italian schools enrolled into the Small Schools Movement. It was structured in two editions, one addressed to the schools of Central and Southern Italy and one for the schools of the Center-North. As a final paper each trainee has produced a “Documentation Notebook” of the daily practice into the classroom and a “Teaching Plan” of her/his SL course. This contribution analyzes the documentation notebooks produced during the first edition (March-June). Each notebook was structured around narrative inputs elaborated by Indire starting from the eight educational quality criteria for a SL project (National Youth Leadership Council, 2008). The narrative practice (Bruner, 1992) encourages the process of “remembering as an essential act of thinking” (Mortari, 2009) and facilitates the emergence of the “practical unconscious” (Perrenoud, 2001) daily implemented by the teachers. The article focuses on the analysis of notebooks as tools for teachers’ reflection on how they designed their SL project and how they conducted their teaching activities into the classroom. The results show that all the practices have been developed according to the eight SL standards for quality practice. At the same time, the narratives give back the sense of ‘generativity’ of the educational practice which constantly interacts with the relational dynamics among teachers and students and pushes the teacher to re-think his own experience according to the interactions and the learning goals.