Questions in the Kitchen, "What's the best recipe for service learning?"

Today, three students and I had the opportunity to volunteer at the Cleveland Foodbank. A student and I started in the kitchen by preparing the food trays that we would later fill with prepared food. We placed a sticker on the bottom of each tray with tomorrow's date. Meanwhile, the other two students were in the warehouse area counting fruit into individual boxes, for example, 90 apples per box.

In the kitchen, my sophomore student and I took our assignments from a kind kitchen cook. She was pretty specific about every task. With our first assignment of labling 2oo trays and putting them on cookie sheets, I wondered how my partner was feeling and what she was thinking...
"Have you ever volunteered before?" "Is this what you imagined it would be like?"

She didn't reveal much about her experience responding to these first questions. I had no idea how to tranform this volunteering into service learning. As we worked though, I noticed that she had one technique for labeling the trays, while I did another.

I decided to change strategies. I apologized for all the annoying questions and I told her about you--this blog--and about how I would love to get her thoughts about the experience before, during, and after. Going with the flow, I shared my own thoughts about the mentally handicapped group that was counting cookies into bags next to us. Their task was to make bags of 3 cookies each. One girl laid all three cookies down in a line and counted out loud, "1, 2, 3" and then bagged them, but a boy across from her separated all the cookies in the box into individual stacks of three cookies before bagging them. I pointed out how we had a different way of doing the same task too.

When I asked if she would like to do more service learning with our group throughout the summer, she said, "Yes, because it is fun to work with your friends." Maybe not the deepest answers, but I could work with that...

Her friends were in the warehouse next door, so, as soon as we finished our first task, I asked the cook if her two classmates could join us to load the food trays.

I may have not been asking the right questions. But I hope she can tell that I am listening.

[Lessons to Consider: (1) The first questions we ask may not be the best, but they can lead us to taking steps in the right direction. (2) There are countless ways to do the same task, and each of us approaches the task differently.]