This assignment focuses on "Creative Expression." It gives adult learners options to choose what's relevant to them. It emphasizes on the learning journey, not something students can cram in a couple of hours at the end of the course and call it a final project.
At-Home Service Learning
Context: During the course of the past seven weeks, you have undertaken the study of several concerns in daily living, such as Food, Water use, Transportation, etc. Among the Jesuit goals for learning is “Contemplation in Action”. The At-Home Service Learning was meant to help you study components of daily life through which you could commit to real change in living as a conscious and caring Earthling.
Picture throwing a handful of pebbles into pond, and all the concentric and overlapping ripples resulting from the impact of those pebbles. Our lives and choices-daily, weekly, momentarily, for holidays, etc.-make ripples like those circles, ebbing and flowing out from what we do into the larger world.
Sometimes our service takes on a larger character, leaving our comfortable circles and reaching out to answer needs like after the September flood in Colorado a couple of years ago, or taking on a relationship with a young person in need, like through Boys and Girls Club. But how often do we realize that choices of how we use water at home, or what we put on the table for breakfast, or what clothes we buy and wear also make those ripples. So sometimes, our service of others in our Sacred Planet can be as invisible as what underwear we choose to wear, yet terribly significant in its impact.
Thus, this project was an opportunity to probe into those sort of unseen, or unexamined daily choices to discern how my life can contribute to the Common Good in ways we may never have thought of before. Hopefully, you have found the learning interesting, eye-opening, maybe fun, and worthwhile. Now is the time to give creative expression to the learning and journaling you have undertaken.
Task: “Creative Expression” is the key term here. What did you study? What did you learn? How did your learning address some of the issues you discovered in the footprint quiz? How do you want to share that learning with us? Examples could include (but are not limited to): Video; graph; outline; drawing, e.g., of seedlings you planted, or chart, e.g., of clothing sources. Photos of a trip to the CSA you joined (Community Supported Agriculture farm), recorded conversation with your teenagers about a changed food routine one night of the week. Receipt from the hardware store for the water-saving devices you bought to install on bathroom and kitchen fixtures. Or of course, you can always write up a few of your journal-entries that encapsulate your “aha’s” and “OMG’s” as you stepped out into new territory as Earthling-in-residence. In fact, you will probably need to offer a little commentary along with your creative expression.
Delivery: Please post your response (video, photos, charts, poems, journaling, whatever format you worked in) to the assignment in the Weeks 7-8 Discussion Forum. Read and respond to the postings of at least one classmate.
Source: HU475 weeks 7-8
