HSP Service Portfolio Components

Service Portfolio Components

While each scholar’s Service Portfolio will communicate the service portfolio’s components differently and reflect the unique experiences and interpretations during the service commitment, the Service Portfolio should include the following elements:

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  • Personal Data

    The Service Portfolio should communicate the individual characteristics of the scholar in addition to the scholar’s service experience. After presented with information about the scholar, the reader should be able to understand your service experience within a broader, individual context. Personal information might cover the scholar’s academic interests and decisions, career outlook, personal achievement and future goals and aspirations. The scholar might also lay out their commitment to service ad rationale to choosing a scholars program with a strong focus on service and social responsibility. This biographical component should represent the scholar uniquely and allow the reader the know the scholar within the context of service.

    • Who am I?
    • What do I do?
    • Why am I performing this project?
  • Mission, Vision, and Personal Statements

    The service portfolios should contain the scholar’s mission and vision for their service at their service site. This mission and vision may change as the scholar’s engagement with the community school site develops over time. Each scholar is placed in a unique position to make an impact on the communities where they serve and the programs delivered at their service sites. Through journal writing and participation in Service Dialogues, scholars will be asked to develop and commit to a mission statement and vision that captures their work at their community school site. In addition to stating their personal mission, which guides each scholar’s service, scholars should discuss their process that lead to the mission statement and vision.

    • What influences do I hope to make?
    • What do I intend to do to make an impact?
    • What issues are unique to my service site and how am I confronting/learning about them?
    • What role do I have at my service site?

     

  • Reflection

    Meaning making is a critical piece of the service-learning journey, and this process is completed through intentional reflection. “Only through such reflection are insights gained that can lead, through human action, to relevant social change brought about by service-learning projects” (Murphy & Schlaerth, 2016, p. 405). Reflection offers a vehicle for critical examination of one’s environment, systems that construct the environment, the self, and society while allowing the scholar to consider the perspectives and circumstances of the community and students whom they serve. Reflection allows scholars space to reflect on the limits of their knowledge and experience while considering deeper relationships and possibilities for the way things appear at their service site.

    Haslam Scholars engage in reflection through journaling and essays written in service dialogues, and service portfolios also include metareflection, culminating reflections that occurs after smaller periods of recurring reflection and at specified points service-learning process.

    Reflection in service-journals occurs:

    • After providing service to the service site
    • After service-dialogues
    • Responding to journaling prompts by the Service Dialogue facilitator

    Service Portfolios should include:

    • Illuminating service-journal entries from service-dialogues that capture the service-learning process
    • Metareflections after the end of a semester, end of a school year, or the conclusion of a club or program
    • Reflections (including revised reflections) of the service site and the community
  • Service Experience

    Service Portfolios should describe in detail the scholar’s service activities, engagement, and time commitment during their four years of service. To provide an effective representation of their service activities on their portfolio that fits within the scholar’s personal and professional goals, prior to engaging in service, scholars should consider their strengths, opportunities available at the school, and the roots causes to social problems that might interest the scholar in order to make the most impact and meaning of the service experience.

    Due to the service relationship that exists between the Haslam Scholars Program and University Assisted Community Schools, scholars are offered an intimate opportunity to enhance, influence, and participate in the program delivery of the community school. Scholars consider the relationships built between the scholar and the students, the scholar and the school, the scholar and the community, in addition to leadership roles held and curriculum developed that contribute to programs at the community school.

    Scholars should go beyond describing the service performed; descriptions of service should also describe the meaning behind the service, perceptions of the community, contributions to the community, and real world problems address by the scholar’s service.

  • Community School Site Description

    As scholars engage, interact, and serve, and thereby identify with, a community, its schools, and its residents, their perception of the community changes overtime. This section of a scholar’s portfolio should describe in detail demographics of the community, its strengths, and challenges faced. In order to accurately achieve this description, the scholar must reflect, early on in their service experience, on their initial perceptions of the community school site and the social systems and structures that lead to those perceptions. The community, school, and neighborhood should not simply be described objectively; the scholar should utilize this space to describe how their initial perceptions of the place changed (or stayed the same) as they became more intimately engaged in that community and the experiences that led to those changes.

  • Periods for Reflection

    Reflection should occur at critical moments during the scholar’s service experience to capture change in the scholar’s perceptions of social problems and their resolution, the scholar’s relationship to the community, and the scholar’s conception of service. Scholars also experience a variety of perspectives regarding their service experience, such as service dialogues and club experiences, that shed light on each scholar’s experience.

    Reflection should occur:

    • After each visit or service experience with the community school
    • After each service dialogue (a journal prompt may be provided)
    • At the conclusion of a semester
    • At the conclusion of an academic year
  • Future Professional Self

    During the construction process of the Service Portfolio, scholars should reflect on two significant questions: "How do I plan to incorporate social justice and social responsibility as a professional?" and "How does my major field of study integrate the concepts of social justice and social responsibility to tackle society's toughest problems?"

    This section of the scholar's portfolio is a look into the future of one's career, post-graduate education, and everyday life. Using the community school service experience as a foundation, scholars should consider how they plan to integrate the concepts of social justice and social responsibility into their personal and professional work and how their fields have contributed or might contribute to solutions to social challenges and . This section of the portfolio includes not only a description of the scholar's commitment to carry out the pillars of the Haslam Scholars Program after graduation but also an overview of current or potential strategies and methods utilize by those in their fields to challenge prevailing norms, such as social and professional organizations, research questions, projects, and hands-on service.