A college student wants to lead a campaign to ban a young adult novel
from his child's elementary school as his service-learning project in a
children's literature course. Believing the book is offensive to
religious sensibilities, he sees his campaign as a service to children
and the community. Viewing such a ban as limiting freedom of speech and
access to information, the student's professor questions whether leading
a ban qualifies as a service project. If the goal of service is to
promote more vital democratic communities, what should the student do?
What should the professor do? How do they untangle competing democratic
values? How do they make a decision about action?
This book addresses the teaching dilemmas, such as the above, that
instructors and students encounter in service-learning courses.
Recognizing that teaching, in general, and service-learning, in
particular, are inherently political, this book faces up to the
resulting predicaments that inevitably arise in the classroom. By
framing them as a vital and productive part of the process of teaching
and learning for political engagement, this book offers the reader new
ways to think about and address seemingly intractable ideological
issues.
Faculty encounter many challenges when teaching service learning
courses. These may arise from students' resistance to the idea of
serving; their lack of responsibility, wasting clients' and community
agencies' time and money; the misalignment of community partner
expectations with academic goals; or faculty uncertainty about when to
guide students' experiences and when direct intervention is necessary.
In over twenty chapters of case studies, faculty scholars from
disciplines as varied as computer science, engineering, English,
history, and sociology take readers on their and their students'
intellectual journeys, sharing their messy, unpredictable and often
inspiring accounts of democratic tensions and trials inherent in
teaching service-learning. Using real incidents - and describing the
resources and classroom activities they employ - they explore the
democratic intersections of various political beliefs along with
race/ethnicity, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and other
lived differences and likenesses that students and faculty experience in
their service-learning classroom and extended community. They share
their struggles of how to communicate and interact across the divide of
viewpoints and experiences within an egalitarian and inclusive
environment all the while managing interpersonal tensions and conflicts
among diverse people in complex, value-laden situations.
The experienced contributors to this book offer pedagogical strategies
for constructing service-learning courses, and non-prescriptive
approaches to dilemmas for which there can be no definitive solutions.
