Box 9, Folder 4, Document 40

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Box 9, Folder 4, Document 40

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DIAKONIA PAIDEIA
and the
SOUTHERN REGIONAL EDUCATION BOARD

RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT INTERNSHIP PROGRAM

By Donald J. Eberly

The Resource Development Project of the Southern
Regional Education Board offers internship appoint-
ments to a limited number of college upperclassmen
and graduate students who demonstrate an interest in
the processes of social and economic change. The
program is designed to provide service-learning ex-
periences for students through assignments to spe-
cific projects of developmental agencies, community
action programs, and to other local, state, or re-
gional organizations concerned with developmental
change.

Financial support is provided by public agencies
interested in economic development, resource devel-
opment, community action and related fields. They
include: Appalachian Regional Commission, Coastal
Plains Regional Commission, Economic Development
Administration, Office of Economic Opportunity and
Tennessee Valley Authority.

This report, prepared by Mr. Donald J. Eberly, Ex-
ecutive Director of the National Service Secretariat,
evaluates the SREB Resource Development Internship
Programs and recommends directions for future service-
learning activities.

SOUTHERN REGIONAL EDUCATION BOARD, Resource Development Project
IS0° Sixti= streets NoWes At tania, Georgia 50515


DIAKONIA PAIDEIA
AND THE
RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT INTERNSHIP PROGRAMS

Donald J. Eberly

It is useless to try to report on SREB's Resource Development

Internship Programs (RDIP) in one dimension, albeit that is the

Traditional approach taken to problem solving. If we want a job
done, we hire someone to do it, |f we want someone to learn, we
teach him and thereby, the assumption goes, he learns. lf we want

To promote university-community relations, we establish a Committee
for the Promotion of Relations between the University and the
Community. But that kind of uni-dimensional approach just won't
work with the Internship Program. However, it is reassuring to
note that if we took a series of snapshots of the program along
different axes, we would see everyday occurrences. Looking along
one dimension, we would see a person doing a job; along another, a

person learning in the field of law or economics; along another, a

person experiencing life in a poverty area for the first time; along
still another dimension, a person deciding upon a career. And so on.
The list is a long one.

The beauty and strength of the RDIP is that all these things
can happen to the same person at the same time, for the internship
concept rejects the notion that learning can occur only at school
as firmly as it does the notion that a job is a job, and has no
business being examined against the writings of Plato, or Spinoza,

or Frost, or Keynes, or King.
Yet there seems to be no word or phrase that captures the
essence of this kind of service-learning program. On such
occasions, it has been helpful to borrow from ancient Greek, as
Norbert Wiener did in coming up the the word "cybernetics," to
try to symbolize the project. In this paper we use diakonia
and paideia, two Greek phrases that carry with them the con-
cepts of teaching and learning through activity, and of a style
of life geared to contributing to the welfare of others.

In our special shorthand,then, this paper is a report on
the diakonia piadeia concept as implemented and administered by
the RDIP. lt is based on the writer's interviews with several of
The interns, counselors, government officials and administrators,
his attendance at RDIP conferences in 1967 and 1968, his perusal
of confidential reports of program participants, and his deliberate
exposure to the diakonia piadeia concept for the past two decades.

Unfortunately, the medium in which this report is rendered
does not permit a simultaneous examination of all aspects of the
concept and the program, so it will look separately at three major
components: manpower for service, the learning aspect, and community-
university relationships. Then it will explore areas where all com-
ponents meet; namely, program balances and imbalances, funding, and
the future. The report assumes the kind of familiarity with the
program that can be obtained by reading The 1966 and |967 reports
of the RDIP.

Manpower for Service



A fundamental change that is occurring in the American concept

of work was emphasized by the interns in their application forms

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