As documented in my previous service post, much of our service learning has been moved online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, I feel our service group has adapted well to these circumstances and focused our efforts on planning for our eventual return to campus and raising awareness about the RCCI. However, after an email exchange with the RCCI teachers, we found out that they would be open to participating in a service-learning session online with our RCCI service group. After agreeing on a date and a time our service group began to plan and prepare for some activities we could conduct over zoom. (CAS Learning Outcome 3 -Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience) After some discussion and preliminary research into simple zoom activities, our group settled on visual art activity. As it was our first online lesson we opted to keep it simple, with an activity in which we would provide a subject matter and then all of us would take 20-30 minutes to draw a picture based on that subject.

The start of the lesson began with some confusion. We planned on dividing our group of students into different breakout rooms, each led by one or two RCCI Service members. However, this model eventually fell through due to the language barrier between many of our members and the students, as well as the fact that more and more students joined our call as the session continued. Eventually, however, we decided to teach the students as one big class in the main call, with our service members chiming in when they had something to add. (CAS Learning outcome 4 – Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences) During the online service lesson, the subject matter we chose was animals and nature. It appeared that many of the RCCI students took well to this subject matter, with most students creating 2 to 3 drawings of their favorite animals and plants. Additionally, I must recognize the enthusiasm of our service members who also participated in the activity and matched the eagerness of the RCCI students. At the end of our 30 minutes, we hosted a brief “art gallery” with everyone taking turns in showing off their artwork.

Overall this online service lesson was a tremendous success. It was very nice to meet up with and reconnect with the RCCI students after almost a year and a half apart, and it was especially nice to see that they still remembered most of us and were enthusiastic about participating in our lesson. Overall we plan to host more of these online service lessons at least once or twice a month, until such time that the RCCI students can return to OSC’s campus.

RCCI Online Service Lesson Art exhibition

CAS Project:

As discussed in my last service post, I discussed a possible collaboration with COMUN to produce RCCI sponsored facemasks as part of our CAS project. This partnership however didn’t come to fruition due to budgetary restrictions. As a result new ideas needed to be brainstormed for a possible CAS project. Eventually, Iris and I after some discussions with our CAS supervisor and a few classmates decided on producing a poster or leaflet with a few tips on how to be an effective RCCI member for those that chose to join next year. RCCI is a service that fundamentally revolves around interacting with and spending time with differently-abled students,  as a result, there is also a small learning curve one must overcome in order to properly establish a connection with the RCCI students. Normally new RCCI members will be able to talk with and learn these tips from their service leaders, however as mentioned before, the pandemic has restricted much of our interaction with the RCCI students, and with Anargi, Iris, and Myself making our way out this year, there are very few members left with any experience interacting with the RCCI students on campus. Therefore we throughout it would be wise to produce this poster/leaflet detailing these tips in order to make our future members transition into RCCI as successful as possible.