Animal Rights: Service Learning Requirement

8 Pages 2111 Words

’s role in speciesism, arguments against animal rights, and the “in your face” approach. Each viewpoint has its relevance and irrelevance depending upon the reader. By offering so many viewpoints, the student would be given the chance to look at the strengths and weaknesses of each. It is important to incorporate all of the views because together they make a strong and compelling argument for the rights of non-human animals.
The service learning portion of the class is what makes it unique and most important. By allowing students the opportunity to get out of the classroom and learn something through hands-on experience, they would be able to transcend the distance that often comes with learning something in class. The classroom is a place to learn about something via text, lectures, or other media, there is no room for actually seeing or feeling an issue first hand. In the essay In the Service of What?: The Politics of Service Learning, Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer touch on overcoming the “otherness” that students often feel when learning about social issues. “The experiential and interpersonal components of service learning activities can achieve the first step toward diminishing the sense of ‘otherness’ that often separates students – particularly privileged students – from those in need.” (Kahne and Westheimer, 596) Kahne and Westheimer are talking about how a student can learn about something in class but still feel detached from a social issue because they haven’t experienced it first hand. By requiring the student to go out and learn among the very ones who are at the front of the issue, they won’t feel so detached from it. In a social issues class, such as the Animal Rights course, it is ideal to have a service learning component for the student to get the most enriching educati...