JOE

       Last quarter I was part of a service-learning project through my art education class. Every Thursday we went to Columbus Collegiate Academy where we taught sixth to eighth grade girls how to use Photoshop on the computer. This project was put in place because of a study done that showed girls are more likely to sit back and not learn as much about computers when boys are present in the class. This is why we only worked with girls for our project. All of these girls were very smart but lacked confidence and skills when it came to working with computers. By the end of the quarter all of the girls knew how to use Photoshop. After reading the second article, I can see how deficiency-focused services would be anything but helpful. However, because the girls we were working with didn't know we were focusing on their "deficiency" they were able to fully embrace the program.
         I don't think promoting a gift-focused service would be successful without increasing civic capacity. It's easy to pull up an article on the computer and read about problems we have in our community but I won't know the strengths of that community until I actually find out for myself. By actually finding out the strengths of a community we can use those to help better it, instead of focusing on the defects and making members of that community feel under-qualified.