EduCare Educational Foundation
07.10.2020, 10:00
The rationale is to introduce service learning as a tool for civic pedagogy to the teachers and civic education trainers and discuss its potential for implementation in the Armenian schools. The topic was seen relevant in terms of the current school curricular reforms in the country, whereby the methodology of service learning could be seen as a potential approach to the project-based and research-based standards of civics in upper secondary school level. Importantly, it was also a chance for the teachers to rethink their pedagogical practices of teaching civics and help their learners to set the bridge between the theory of democracy and its practice and connect classroom learning and the community reality. As such, service-learning allows young people to devote their time to working over a social issue in their community, while at the same time helps develop their critical and analytical thinking skills to acknowledge and promote respect for human rights. Through service-learning, young people learn how to extract the rights embedded in every service and look at them. For instance, by combining a service project about children out of school with learning about the right to education, young people lean about the violations of the right to mandatory 12-year education in Armenia and design ways to address this violation, for instance, by exploring home-schooling options for such children, or exploring financial barriers to their access.
Anna Gevorgyan
