Reflective Journal: My Service Learning Experience

Everbody does have the abilty to affect others, and so do I. In this summer, I served as a teacher in a summer camp, teaching primary school students. Throughout my service learning experience, I gained a lot of insights and reflections. I served, and at the same time I learnt. I have comparatively significant changes in two aspects, including my passion in helping the underprivileged children and adolescents, as well as my problem-solving and decision-making capacities. Therfore, I would like to mainly focus on these two aspects in this reflective journal. I will first give a brief introduction of the summer camp and students, and then I will take about my reflections in two aspects, which are the two I have introduced before.

We served students and aimed to develop their “CAR”, which means “Competence”, “Aspiration” and “Resilience”. Students that I served are mainly from five difference primary schools and they are primary 4 students. According to Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development (1982), they are in school age. School age children are acting as a team player and developing close friendship. I learnt all these theories during lectures in semester two. But at that time, they did not seem very useful to me. I was worrying whether students from diverse background would be able to

As a teacher, especially the one teaching children, being flexible is a must. I liked sticking to plans because that made me comfortable. However, children are too energetic and emotional. Unexpected incidents occurred oftenly during classes. Some children cried suddenly during classes and some students had aggressive body contacts with others. At the beginning, I was really nervous and felt uncertain in solving problems. All the sudden incidents forced me to make immediate decisions and provided me many chances to train my problem-solving and decision-making