How Volunteerism Promotes Learning

How Volunteerism Promotes Learning
Jose Mari Almoradie Carpena
May 31, 2022

Do Volunteers Gain Anything at All?

From a layman’s perspective, volunteerism is a one-way street: volunteers help people, and that’s all that’s all she wrote. Indeed, many believe that “a “volunteer” is someone who contributes time to helping others with no expectation of pay or other material benefit to herself” (Wilson & Musick, 1999, p. 141). Volunteers however claim  they “get” something , perhaps not something material (although sometimes that may be the case), out of their volunteering experience. For example, volunteers may develop a better sense of self-confidence over their volunteer experience (Leviten-Reid & CampbelI, 2016). On a more social aspect, volunteering gave Arab volunteer women a more active role in their community, something which their culture reserves more for men (Daoud et al., 2010). Indeed, volunteering benefits the volunteers as well. Of particular interest to us this Volunteerism Month (May) is the potential effect volunteerism has on learning and knowledge acquisition. To be clear, volunteering is different from service-learning, in the sense that service-learning usually happen in prescribed and required courses.

Learning While Volunteering

As a long-time volunteer myself, I can attest to the notion that volunteers rarely claim that they volunteer to get educated or learn about something. After all, when we volunteer to do something, we assume that the organization needs someone who is already capable of doing what’s to be done. For example, volunteer doctors would already assume that they already have enough medical knowledge to help those in need. In the same way, volunteer teachers would assume that they already have the teaching competencies to teach in a voluntary capacity. As Cox (2002) put it, “Explicitly educational motives are rarely cited as the reason, people engaged in voluntary activity perceive their activities as ‘doing’ rather than learning…” (p. 168).

However, while it is not an explicit motive per se, it sometimes becomes a product of the volunteering experience itself. But how does the “learning” actually happen in volunteer arrangements? We are used to thinking of “learning” in educational institutions, or what we call “formal learning”. In the case of the volunteers, they engage in “informal learning”. Through this informal learning process, volunteers gain knowledge tacitly or implicitly while doing their voluntary duties (Duguid et al., 2013). It is not “formal” in the sense that it is a structured activity aimed at allowing someone to learn something, as opposed to a classroom activity or a training program. For example, hospital volunteers in Germany reported that they “learned” by having to know what the regular staff needed, and being taught by the regular staff on how to do certain tasks (Velarde, 2020). Velarde further noted that some of the learning happened “on the boundaries” of the volunteers’ routines, such as being asked (and trained) to insert a catheter (even though it wasn’t technically allowed). Another example would be that of Akingbola et al.’s (2010) study about Red Cross volunteers’ learning: while consistent with our primary idea that many enter volunteer programs without the explicit goal of learning something, their sample stated they learned a myriad of skills and knowledge during their volunteering experience, including awareness of the multicultural environment they lived in, and international issues.  In my personal experience as a volunteer, while I did not realize it while volunteering, I learned a lot about logistics because of my time volunteering for DLSU-COSCA’s donation drives, about distance teaching because of DLSU-COSCA’s partnership with the Department of Education’s Alternative Learning System initiative, and about creative talent development when I volunteered for Husay Co. I learned not because of any formal training, but because the job demanded it, and the people around me taught me on the go.

So What Now?

So what can we take from the fact that learning can happen when people volunteer? Maybe we can promote volunteering among our students stronger, or create volunteer opportunities for our students? For example, maybe our education students might learn a lot if they would volunteer to be Teaching Assistants in other classes, or maybe our Business students would benefit from a volunteer program created by the Business Department and a social enterprise.

Indeed, we have long thought of volunteerism which solely benefits the community or beneficiaries, however, now we can utilize it to promote our students’ learning. We have to admit that we can’t teach our students everything, but maybe this route can fill in that gap.

References

Akingbola, K., Duguid, F., & Viveros, M. (2013). Learning and knowledge transfer in volunteering: exploring the experience of Red Cross volunteers. In F. Duguid, K. Mündel, & D. Schugurensky (Eds.) Volunteer work, informal learning and social action (pp. 63-78). Brill Sense.

Cox, E. (2002). Rewarding volunteers: A study of participant responses to the assessment and accreditation of volunteer learning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(2), 156-170.

Daoud, N., Shtarkshall, R., Laufer, N., Verbov, G., Bar‐el, H., Abu‐Gosh, N., & Mor‐Yosef, S. (2010). What do women gain from volunteering? The experience of lay Arab and Jewish women volunteers in the Women for Women’s Health programme in Israel. Health & Social Care in the Community, 18(2), 208-218.

Duguid, F., Mündel, K., & Schugurensky, D. (2013). Volunteer work and informal learning: A conceptual discussion. In F. Duguid, K. Mündel, & D. Schugurensky (Eds.). Volunteer work, informal learning and social action (pp. 17-36). Brill Sense.

Leviten-Reid, C., & Campbell, R. (2016). Volunteer roles and the benefits of volunteering: An examination of nonprofit housing cooperatives. Community Development, 47(4), 464-480.

Serrano Velarde, K. (2020). Informal learning in formal organizations: The case of volunteer learning in the hospital. Current Sociology, 68(4), 572-591.

Wilson, J., & Musick, M. (1999). The effects of volunteering on the volunteer. Law and Contemporary Problems, 62, 141-167.