Service Learning
Helping students grow through meaningful service, ethical understanding and diverse community engagement
The College motto, To serve with wisdom and courage, underpins the rationale of our sequential and fully embedded Service Learning program, curated by Catalyst: Centre for Service and Social Enterprise.
Service Learning has a broad focus at the College: it sees issues of justice and ethics embedded across the curriculum, promotes optimised student learning and positive student wellbeing, and facilitates a connected community. Our program’s four-pillared approach is based on the concepts of:
Intentional Learning
At its centre, Service Learning is an educational model with educational goals. It is an instructional strategy that overtly seeks to meet learning goals and, in the case of All Saints’ College, to build an understanding of content which is studied through the Australian Curriculum.
Meaningful Service
All activities in our Service Learning program must be of real value to those being served, and must provide an engaging, meaningful and personally-relevant experience to the participants.
Diversity
We recognise that it is important that students are given the opportunity to gain a broad view and a respect for the diverse nature of the community, nation and world in which they live. Our Service Learning program is also based upon the belief that all students’ gifts, talents and interests are valued and incorporated into the way they engage with service;
Service
The last of these four principles sets the background within which all Service Learning takes place, that of working in mutually beneficial, ongoing partnerships that collaboratively work to address real needs within each of the communities involved.
With this in mind, our Service Learning program meets developmentally appropriate learning needs of the youngest of our students and grows with them as their needs, abilities and capacities expand. In this way, our young people are continually empowered and enabled to develop their potential to be connected, confident and compassionate members of their society, committed to active and worthwhile service in care for their community and each other.