Veterans and their contributions

As someone who grew up surrounded by the military, not only are both my parents Army veterans, my father served both in Vietnam and Desert Storm. Not to mention it has been on my mind lately, I decided to focus my attention a service learning plan focusing on veterans of foreign wars.

Brief Description:

Eighth grade students interviewed veterans from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War as part of an interdisciplinary unit in social studies and English language arts. The veterans' contributions and insights made the curriculum more meaningful, real, and relevant to the students' lives. Through the veterans' first-hand knowledge and experiences, students learned valuable lessons about humanity, patriotism, and sacrifice not provided by textbooks.

Veterans

In looking at this service plan, it is a well-thought out interdisciplinary plan utilizing both English and Social Science. Not only does it address the many aspects of inquiry in social science, it gives students a new appreciation for the service that veterans have done. It allows students the opportunity to interview Veterans, giving them access to primary sources rich in information. It also offers students a unique perspective on war, bravery, and patriotism. The veterans can really emphasize how war is not like what students watch at the movies. Learning about war through a first person perspective and some of the long term effects, such as life altering disabilities, students can have their perspective’s drastically changed.

The combination of interviewing, compiling, relating, and creating all work to make for an in-depth experiment in social science. The students honed their research skills by interviewing the Veterans, learning to formulate questions that gained the information needed. At the end the students extrapolated the data they needed to get a real world picture of what the Veterans faced and how the ramifications of which affect them today. It gave them insight into the Veterans’ psyche and an idea of what bravery and patriotism really looked like. In the end the students worked together to create a quilt representing both the students and the Veterans’ accomplishments. This is one part of the service learning plan. The English portion also involved reading relevant literature and relating it back to what the soldiers might have experienced. Creating their own personal works to communicate what they felt about their experiences with the Veterans. It resulted in a long term relationship between the school and the Veterans. Not only did one class benefit, but future classes as well.

Several challenges that I could see, would possibly be not enough students to interview the volunteering Veterans and perhaps the students’ reticence in interviewing Veterans. I think students would hesitate only because they wouldn’t know how to react to the Veterans. The plan mentions they overcame the problem with the Veterans’ by creating a panel for those Veterans’ not interviewed to evaluate and observe the students. It might have further helped with the students’ reticence if perhaps two students interviewed each student. It has been my experience that students usually feel braver when they have a partner. Overall, the plan is really well thought out and could potentially be someth