Spring Staycation is coordinated by the Office of Service-Learning and spans the entire week. Participating students are required to attend all events. It should be noted that this not an opportunity for community service credit hours—the students who choose to participate are doing so because of their own drive to learn and serve. Service learning is different from volunteering in that activities are structured around learning experiences. Students learn while serving the greater community.
Each day, a specific topic is covered. During the morning, students meet on campus for breakfast and a reflection section. After lunch, they travel off campus to apply what they've discussed that morning.
Monday began with a reflection about community building—an overview of the week's objectives—and transitioned into a discussion about teen violence. Two ex-gang members visited the group to talk about how they broke the cycle of violence in their own lives, and how they now work with troubled teens to do the same. In the afternoon the group visited Lakeside Academy, a youth home where students are challenged to redirect negative behaviors, confront their failures, and experience success in every area of their lives. The staff helps students acknowledge difficult times while helping them to work through those experiences in a positive way with beneficial results.
During the morning session, Shawn Tenney, director of Service-Learning, encouraged the students to pay attention to the body language of the kids at Lakeside from they time they arrive to the end of the session, "a connection happens and its pretty amazing." WMU students met with about 35 students from Lakeside and got to listen to their stories and learn about why they were at Lakeside. At the post-reflection back on campus, one student commented that she realized she was holding back during the discussion, "I was pre-judging, and once I realized that I was able to let go and connect with this person."
Other topics for the week include health equity, the Autism spectrum, and mental illness. The overall objectives are to stimulate intellectual curiosity, promote service-learning, encourage community engagement, increase awareness of and challenge biases, and to build empathy by approaching everyone as co-teachers and co-learners. Students will observe differences in how people are treated, prompting them to look at like and others with a more inclusive and understanding perspective.
"I tell them it's a resume builder," said Ashley Braatz, marketing coordinator for the Office of Service-Learning. "A lot of their majors are psychology or biomedical sciences so they are gaining first-hand experience with the people they may be working with in the 'real world."
The Office of Service-Learning also helps instructors and professors find ways to incorporate service learning into their classes, or helps them structure entire courses around a service-learning initiative.
To learn more about the Office of Service-Learning, please visit their website at wmich.edu/servicelearning.