How Mandatory Volunteering Prepares Future Volunteers in Adult Literacy

Mandatory volunteering; experiential learning, adult literacy, case study, Tanzania

Abstract

Mandatory volunteering is a pedagogical approach that puts a requirement within the curriculum for students to accumulate some credit hours while providing service in the community. It is aimed at improving practical learning, linking colleges with the community, and as presented in this study, acting as a breeding programme for future volunteers. The purpose of the study was to make an analysis of how a mandatory
volunteering programme could be used to prepare future volunteers for adult literacy programmes. Based on the experiential learning model, this study adopted a case study design in which a single case was followed and deeply analysed and discussed.
Adoption of case study was aimed at understanding, from the individual student, the psychological and practical features that make a successful volunteering experience.
It was found out that the crucial factors for an effective volunteering experience were: having an experience full of inequalities and challenges; a positive reflection of the experience; an intellectual ability to advance a situated theorisation, and ability to redesign a plan of action based on new theorisation; and an internal drive to implement the redesigned plan of action. It is concluded that under such conditions, a mandatory volunteering can be a springboard to future volunteering behaviour. The study proposes a simple adult literacy volunteering model that can be
adopted for use in other contexts as well as for further studies.