Double happiness: secondary school students' experiences of community service-learning in an international school offering the International Baccalaureate Programme in Vietnam

© 2016 Charmaine Farah BaselThis study centres on the community service experiences that secondary school students had in an international school offering the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) in Vietnam. The thesis is an account of students’ experiences within the context of the experiential educational core of the International Baccalaureate (IB) referred to as Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) and the cultural context of Vietnam. The study documents what inspired students’ desire to initially participate and continue doing service. It explores how community service experience helped to shape students’ attitudes towards the children with whom they worked and how service practice contributed to their developing ethical perspectives. Documented in the thesis are the experiences of secondary students in two different service modes offered by the school: one offering sustained weekly service opportunities; the other an immersive five-day experience for IBDP students. Undertaken over a four-month period, data was collected through participant observation, interviews with staff and students, photographs taken at the sites, school assemblies and IB curricular and school documents, in addition to informal conversations with students and staff to and from the research sites. Among the findings of the study were that community service was inspired by either family or friends as either an ‘essential’ or ‘good’ thing to do. The key finding of the study was that the reason students were compelled to continue service was because of the reciprocal happiness they shared with the children with whom they worked. While reciprocal happiness was the motivation of all participants in the study, those with sustained service experience increasingly placed the children with whom they worked as the central focus, whereas students with less experience focussed more on the way their service participation affected them personally. The thesis found that while the IBDP CAS programme and the school’s emphasis on community service through the appointment of a Community Service project manager offered a solid framework for the service experiences of students to grow, it was the influence of the informal culture of service in Vietnam that enabled community service to flourish and become interwoven into the fabric of the school culture. The thesis highlights the potential of community service-learning in education as a transformative pedagogy, which contributes to the reciprocal happiness of participants and a growing sense of responsibility to extend care to others beyond the service experience