Mission trips and Service Learning

Some of my best experiences in life have been the mission trips I have gone on with my church.  I have to been to inner city Philadelphia, rural Arkansas, and Indian reservations in Montana, Arizona, and North Dakota.  I have had so much fun and been so moved by the relationships I built and strengthened on these trips and the work we did to help others.  I am going on another mission trip this spring break to Mississippi and Louisiana through Luther and Habitat for Humanity.  I am quite excited for this trip.  In class on Friday, when Professor Langholz was eloquently delivering his "Dews and Doughnuts of Teaching" (his version of Do's and Don'ts that came with Mt Dew and doughnuts), I began to think about how I could implement these experiences into my work as a teacher.  He said that as teachers, we should be eager to pick up new hobbies, travel,  go on adventures, and take risks because teachers need to be interesting people.  My experiences on these mission trips give me a different insight into the way the world works and make me unique.  As a teacher, I would love to be able to use these experiences as a source of learning or inspiration for my students and encourage my students to also become involved in some sort of service.  I believe that this may be just as beneficial for those helping as for those who are being helped.  As a science teacher we could even do class activities that would include service type projects like cleaning up parks or picking up garbage around a lake or in a forest.  The students would be participating in stewardship, getting exercise, working as a group, and learning about the negative impact that humans can have on the environment.  All of these are beneficial consequences of this type of service learning.