February 01, 2000
Boston Conference Focuses on Service Learning
How should secondary educational institutions define "service"? Can a university embrace community partnerships without losing institutional identity and student focus? These questions helped set the opening tone for "A Future of Service: A National Conference on Service-Learning in Religion," held 17-18 November in Boston. Conference organizers Joseph Favazza and Michael McClain, both faculty at Rhodes College, introduced the themes of the weekend gathering: definitions in service-learning; creating the engaged university; the dilemma of descriptive versus normative agendas; encountering the other; creating community partnerships; and creating service-learning syllabi.
Organized for faculty in religious studies departments, the conference demonstrated how disparate current understandings of service-learning are -- even within a uni-disciplinary conversation. But panelists' presentations also demonstrated that service-learning faculty's underlying goals and objectives are often similar: their pedagogies aim to provoke insights into one's social condition, into oneself, and into the other, for the sake of understanding - and perhaps changing - the contours of our social structures.
How that happens, and how "radical" a service-learning program becomes, depends on its administration and leadership. One conference attendee noted that faculty at his institution are wary of adopting theory-practice pedagogies because of pressures to adopt what he perceived as the "liberal agenda" underlying most service programs. "Some of us just want to give our students the chance to sit with people in pain," he noted. "We don't want to change the governmental structure. Would such a modest aim fit under the rubric of service-learning programs?" Others built on this question: how do we communicate ideas and visions when service-learning has so many definitions and languages?
Dr. Elizabeth Bounds of Emory University noted that diversity in service and theory-practice learning techniques can be fruitful as well as frustrating. Variety in our viewpoints allows for a spectrum of political and philosophical views on service; transformative encounter with "the other" can thus occur both within a Marxist or socialist ideology and a more mainstream or capitalist arena.
Of additional importance, Bounds suggested, are questions that force service-learning practitioners to engage in critical self-reflection. What is preventing me from engaging more fully in practices of service and community engagement? Are there expectations in the role of teacher or faculty that create intrinsic barriers?
In an evening keynote address, Dr. Keith Morton of Providence College discussed these questions through a historical lens. Morton spoke about the history of American educational movements for social engagement, highlighting Dorothy Day and Jane Adams. He noted that Day and Adams entered service not only from an objective desire to help others, but also because, quite frankly, helping the poor gave their own turbulent lives coherence and meaning. Was their psychological need to do service thus the primary motive for their actions?
Morton responded to the inferred question by suggesting that service is currently one crucial way students make meaning or sense of their world. It is, among other things, an attempt to find wholeness amidst a culture that fragments and alienates. As such, service-learning should be valued not only for those times when it inaugurates grand social change, but also for those occasions when it brings a spark of meaning, stability, or delight to an individual - whether she be the one ostensibly "being served" or the one "doing" the service.
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