In 2019, I did AmeriCorps NCCC, a program for people aged 18-26 where you are put on teams of 8-10 people and sent around the country to do service projects with different non-profit organizations. My first round was in Pearland, Texas where my team and I did Hurricane Harvey restoration projects for homeowners. I found this round to be extremely challenging, as we did not have clear leadership, the non-profit we worked with did not give us proper training or equipment, and we had no recourse to address these things.
My second round project was a different story. I was assigned a new team and team leader, and we were headed to Greeley, Colorado to work with Habitat for Humanity (HFH). I had extremely limited experience with construction work, just a few well-intentioned but maybe not the best executed church service trips from when I was younger. I didn’t really count the previous round as experience as we had been doing more late stage restoration projects and a lot of mold remediation which wasn’t really going to be relevant to this project. For this round we were going to be building houses from the ground up.
Right away the HFH staff taught us how to be safe on the jobsite. They taught us to always wear our hard hats, how to properly set a ladder, how to use the tools safely, and to always ask if we had questions. This was particularly important in fostering a learning environment (and a safe jobsite). They encouraged us to be curious and never shamed us for having questions or difficulty in completing a task. As a team we celebrated each other’s wins and supported each other when we struggled. This was key for encouraging us to take positive risks for learning. We were not afraid to fail at a task, we knew our teammates and leaders had our back.
The best thing about being a learner in this kind of environment was that it was fun. Every day presented a new challenge, and we were eager to learn how to overcome each one. We had a routine, we started every day at the jobsite the same: one person would pose a fun question and then we would go in a circle and answer the question and pick a stretch for the group to do. This helped us go into the day focused and in the right mindset to work and learn.
Reflecting on this experience makes me think about how I can carry over the aspects of that learning environment to a classroom. I would love for my class to feel sort of like a team, working together to learn. I’d like for them to feel supported by me and their peers if possible. I’d also like to create some structure and routine in the classroom. Those were three key takeaways I got from my experience working with HFH, in addition to the skills I gained on the jobsite.
Sarah Sykora 