School/university partnership to explore prosocial behaviour and service

The College was delighted to invite Dr Bosco Rowland to a K-12 staff meeting to speak about his research into prosocial behaviour in Australian children and adolescents. Especially of interest was the connection between volunteering during the school years and a reduction in poor mental health. Dr Rowland is a registered psychologist who works as a scientist practitioner with Eastern Health Clinical School at Monash University. His work focuses on developing social behavioural principles relating to contemporary public health problems. In particular, he examines behaviours associated with health, social and emotional development, and explores the role of risk and protective factors.

Pymble Ladies’ College is developing a service learning framework as part of the Social Intelligence Strategic Pillar. We began by conducting a thorough literature review on the subject, including definitions of service learning, charity and community service. Our guiding questions for the review were: 

• What are Pymble’s goals with service, charity, service learning and giving back to the community? 
• What are the characteristics of our community that we need to consider? 
• What do we want to maintain? What do we want to change? 
• How would we like service and giving back to be connected to other fields in the College? 

The literature review allowed us to identify key points for further investigation which led to the connection with Dr Rowland. The staff were particularly engaged with his research findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, with many questions following his presentation. His key point that, “during the adolescent years (13-17 years), engaging in volunteering reduces the likelihood of poor mental health by 28%” (Rowland and Evans-Whipp, 2023) led us to reflect on the importance of a service learning framework facilitating students’ involvement in all kinds of prosocial activities, including volunteering through school and with the family.

‘Prosocial behaviours are activities that have the aims of benefiting others or society … Prosocial behaviours towards others are developmentally important, as they can help children and young people learn to take another person’s perspective, negotiate difference, and develop social and emotional skills’. (Rowland & Evans-Whipp, 2023, p. 1).

Junior School (K-6) staff could recognise that their efforts in building a ‘community of kindness’ and the recent introduction of a ‘service journal’ were steps that would help develop prosocial skills in young students. Dr Rowland’s research affirms that building strong foundations in the younger years will provide protective layers as children enter into adolescence.

Staff comments

Great speaker, really wonderful to see the research and very proud that the Junior School has been focusing on the three elements – to self, to others and to the environment.

I loved seeing evidence for what seems like common sense.

This session was great. I loved hearing about the research behind the importance of service/volunteering and its impact not only on the world around us but on the wellbeing of those doing the service/volunteering. It was wonderful hearing that what is being done in the Junior school with the focus on Kindness to self, others and the environment/world is supported by this research too. I would love to work with Bosco more on this and learn more about his research and the implications for Pymble!

Reference:  Rowland, B. and Evans‑Whipp, T. (2023), Prosocial behaviours and the positive impact on mental Health, Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC).  Snapshot Series, Issue 9, pp.1-8.