Timothy Stanton, Dwight Giles, Jr., Nadine Cruz (1999) Service Learning: A Movement’s Pioneers Reflect on Its Origins, Practice, and Future, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 272pp.

OVERVIEW

Three important national figures in the field of service learning, two of them associated with Stanford University’s Haas Center for Public Service, and the other a professor of the practice of human and organizational development at Vanderbuilt University, use oral history to recreate the rise and history of service learning.

Service learning, which joins communities with academia, service with innovative academic analysis, developed from serious reflections of New Deal work programs, radical thoughts from the turbulent 1960s, and thinking out of the government’s VISTA and Peace Corp programs, according to these authors.

They find the earliest definition of service learning coming from the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB, 1969): “the accomplishment of tasks that meet genuine human needs in combination with conscious educational growth.” (p.2)

Service learning is not value neutral, or at least it was not in its early expressions.

Jane Kendall (former director National Society for Experimental Education) notes that “a good service learning program helps participants see their (service) questions in the larger contexts of issues of social justice and social policy—rather than in the context of charity.”

For example, service-learning programs should not just recruit students to volunteer in soup kitchens. They should also ask them to reflect on why people are hungry. Literacy volunteers should be asked to consider why there are so many illiterate people in an “advanced society.”

Service learning advocates question whether experiences alone will yield help for communities and development of civic consciousness of students (Couto, 1982). They call for structured opportunities for critical reflection on service so students “better understand the causes of social injustice… (and) take action to eliminate the causes” (Baker, 1983:10).

Practitioners and theorists of service learning react against paternalistic charity and suggest that the recipients of aid be brought into the process. An example given are the “three principles of service-learning” from Robert Sigmon (1979):

1. Those being served control the services(s) provided.

2. Those being served become better able to serve and be served by their own actions.

3. Those who serve are also learners and have significant control over what is expected to be learned.

For Sigmon, “those being served control the service…. The needs of the community, rather than of the academy, determine the nature of the service provided.” (p.3)

For Santon (1992): “I serve you in order that I may learn from you. You accept my services in order that you may teach me.”

Service learning is a form of experiential education; it “combines community service with academic excellence.” It is a “pedagogy of learning through service.” (Chisholm, 1987) (pp. 4-5)

History and stories have a place in service learning. According to T.Minh-ha Trinh, a Vietnamese-American filmmaker and writer:

The simplest vehicle of truth, the story, is also said to be… ‘natural for revealing life.’ Its fascination may be explained both by its power to give a vividly felt insight into the life of other people and to revive or keep alive the forgotten… parts of ourselves. (1989:122; p. 10)

Debates about service learning followed along three axes, which the authors arranged in triangle form:

         Service

EducationDemocracy

  Service – Democracy: What is the relationship between 
  service and social change?

Democracy – Education: What is the purpose of education 
          in a democracy?

Service – Education: How does education serve society?

Most of the early pioneers of service learning shaped their research and discussion under the third axis and question above.

Service learning includes listening, critical analysis, action, reflection, improved action, evaluation, and writing. It deals with needs, resources, mission or purpose statements, capacities, goals, functions, and outcomes.

Ch. 3 examines “Seeds of Commitment: Personal Accounts of the Pioneers.” Under “Spiritual Seeds” Helen Lewis tells of meeting Clarence Jordan of Koinonia Farms, Americus, Georgia while she was a freshman in college. This was back in the 1940s (WWII) when Koinonia was a pacifist farming community of blacks and whites—with bullet holes to prove it! She heard him tell the story of the Good Samaritan in a way that led her to fight segregation, get arrested in 1948, and go on as a strong figure in service learning.

In Ch. 4, “First Professional Steps: A Journey into Uncharted Territory,” Mel King of Boston explains how he attended MIT, watched graduates transform creative ideas into wealthy start-ups, and, on an airplane, discussed, with the school’s president, sitting in first class with an empty seat beside him, how the resources of MIT might benefit the poor. Out of that conversation Boston’s Community Fellows Program was born. 

The prime result of this book’s historical study:

… we have learned that early practitioners were activists in nature, with many of them approaching their work in education from a community base. They were motivated by early family and community experience, by deep philosophical and spiritual values, and especially by political events and social movements of the 1960s. Although they articulate varying priorities in terms of seeking impact on students, communities, and postsecondary education missions and curricula, they share a deep commitment to connecting with the academy (especially students) with issues, people, and suffering in off-campus communities. (p.241)

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. Why were you interested in this article/book, and what have you gotten from it? What are the many strands here unfinished, about which you would like to follow up?

2. How important do you consider service-learning to be? How does it challenge education—administration, teachers/faculty, and students? How does it challenge struggling, or wealthy, communities?

3. In your opinion, what, specifically, does education miss without service learning in its curricula?

4. What’s missing in an impoverished community/neighborhood without interaction with a close-by college, university or secondary school? What can be done about this?

5. Religiously or spiritually, do you consider Service-Learning to be a justice issue, a Gospel issue? Why or why not? 

6. How can churches and religious institutions, their schools, Christian colleges and seminaries be faithful to Scripture by engaging their congregation and students in service-learning?

7. As a student, what might you do in a college/university or seminary without service-learning?

IMPLICATIONS

1. Democracy demands broad or universal education. Education must be relevant to the needs of communities and individuals—in that order. To separate students from their past and future contexts is foolish. For one thing, it fosters self-aggrandizing at the expense of the most needy.

2. Education that separates itself from the needs of the world and surrounding communities contributes to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful at the expense (and necessary exploitation) of the poor and needy.

3. Students who do not experience discrimination, poverty, and suffering miss holistic education and are pushed toward self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence.

4. Communities left to suffer with inadequate social resources will turn to alternative economies and illegal activities.

5. The complexity of justice, economic and political realities demands the highest academic investigation and analysis. Such analysis cannot be complete or whole without relational contacts with the strengths and positive resources, on the one hand, and dysfunctions on the other, of impoverished communities.

6. The mission of churches (all religious groups) and their institutions, according to the Scripture, mandates engagement of congregations and students in service-learning. Only then can their teaching be relevant and holistic.

Dean Borgman cCYS