By Sneha Gade
VCU Aspire is a VCU Living Learning Community for learning how to create positive changes through service-based activities, course work, and extracurriculars. I committed to this two-year-long certificate program to broaden my learning experience past textbooks and lecture halls. Service-learning was introduced to us on the first day of class as an “intentional” teaching method. An essential skill I wanted to acquire through my undergraduate experience is discovering my learning style. Through my non-science classes, I was able to learn through service-learning methods. This style of learning pushed me to enhance engagement to create real-life learning scenarios and guided reflections. Since these experiences were in real life they were an active learning form that reinforced materials learned in class. For example, we had a unit about cultural appropriation/appreciation where I got to meet a Ghanaian Indian person, I had never met someone from that background before. Learning from and meeting her broadened my perspectives on cultural appropriation. Besides the real-life experiences, we have training and certifications we must go through to gain a higher-level understanding of appropriate reactions in community-based programs with different impact groups. Through the credit-bearing course and the co-curricular activities I have thus far engaged in, I have had an exceptional amount of community engagement that I have never experienced before. Due to my passion for this program, I have proposed and enrolled in a VCU Honors-Aspire Independent study project to focus on reflecting the latent benefits of service. I am hoping to broaden my knowledge about service and service-learning more in the future.
