Humanities Essay
Difference and Diversity: Challenging the American Dream: Cultivating Reciprocal University-Community Relationships through Critical Service-Learning Practices
by Lisa Thornhill
PhD Candidate, Department of Language and Rhetoric
The University of Washington
Abstract: This paper argues for the importance of cultivating reciprocal university-community relationships through critical service-learning practices. Emerging from the reflections culled from my 2008-2009 Huckabay Teaching Fellowship, this paper explores ways of building from the problems and possibilities surrounding dominant modes of engaging service-learning between university and community constituents. At the same time, this paper explores the characteristics that are increasingly defining 21st century critical teaching and outreach practices. It ends by asking: what inroads can be made for negotiating the administrative and teacherly duties involved within the terrain of implementing an exploratory model of instructor-led curricular design?
Throughout campuses in the US, there is amove to incorporate service-learning into the undergraduate and graduate school experience. As service-learning scholarship attests, there are many benefits to service-learning that include an increase in student, community, and departmental involvement (Billig and Waterman, 2003; Korza et al, 2005). At my home institution, the University of Washington, the number of participants, courses and departments involved in service-learning has almost doubled since 1998 (Carlson Center, July 2007).
However, there are still many challenges to the service-learning model. The UW Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center describes such problems as those that include a general lack of time to devote to the site and “[d]ifficulty relating service with coursework and/or the work of the organization.” Such challenges can outweigh the benefits received by community members. My own experience working in a number of different teaching and community sites exposes some of these problems related to service, learning, and various institutional constraints; upon reflecting on those experiences, my current pedagogical project has emerged.
I begin by describing two particular periods in my life that are formative to my current project. The first experience was when I was working on my Master’s Degree while teaching high school English, Spanish, and creative expression in Austin, Texas. Over the span of four years, I taught at two different schools (one that I helped start) that targeted underserved youth. At each school, the mission focused on creating a safe space for the students and tailoring the educational plan to each individual student’s strengths and goals. To explore spaces of engagement at the nearby university, we would research topics at campus libraries and extend our secondary classrooms to the campus museums and cafes. We also extended our classroom to local community spaces, involving teachers and students alike at the local food bank or community center as a way of putting into public practice the socially conscious tenets that emerged from our classroom readings and discussions.
Between that time and when I left to enroll into the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, I was an academic adviser who focused on diversity recruitment and retention. As a UW graduate student, I taught a variety of courses that employed service-learning and I also started a program that connected students with language abilities other than English with area school children through a tutoring program.
Although each of these periods provided opportunities to connect community and university spaces in a number of different ways, there was still a disjuncture between the way in which the surrounding community and the university engaged. While the university was open to secondary students using its facilities, it was harder to find a space from which we could involve students in the everyday life of the university. My work as a college diversity recruiter did not allow for the space of sustained community engagement (just a quick weekend trip to towns on the Texas border). As a graduate instructor, the classes that I taught that had service-learning components were consistently marked by students dispersing across several different sites, forcing us to substitute depth for breadth; a lack of time to engage course material with those site visits; and little sustained interaction with community members. At times, I did not have the opportunity to construct course goals and objectives in dialogue with the community. Although this model is in some ways seen as a practical method of incorporating service-learning into the busy life of the research university, such challenges can outweigh the benefits received by community sites and lessen the potential impact on student learning.
In March 2008, I applied for a Huckabay Fellowship at the University of Washington. This fellowship provides one quarter of funding to develop a course that focuses on teaching and learning at the college and university level and is centered on the fellow’s teaching interests. I decided to build from my previous frustrations with various community-university engagements to implement a course that could create reciprocal and sustained engagement between university and community members—while also enacting the critical tenets of my course materials. My proposal was to develop a service-learning course that better positions the community served and students involved. “Difference and Diversity: Challenging the American Dream” approaches the structural challenges to the service-learning experience by dialoguing about the degree to which the American Dream holds true for all Americans. All students participate with the same site so that site issues can be readily engaged with course materials. Where service-learning courses have been critiqued for uncritically mining the site for its one-quarter use-value, the course gives something back to the community that has material value: community participants gain valuable inroads to university spaces through planned activities and possible course credit. To extend course goals, participants can continue to interact through the course website and UW students can use their experience as a possible Capstone project in their respective fields.
By rethinking its inherent pedagogical approach, this project would ideally reconfigure the relationship between service and learning in three ways: 1) learning becomes an experience that places both sites in responsibility to one another; 2) learning becomes a critical practice of reflection, collaboration, and transformation of knowledge; 3) learning becomes a place that fosters future relationships and projects. This approach would explore a fundamental question inherent to service-learning’s responsibility: how might pedagogy and civic engagement be used in a way that is mindful of what the Imagining America’s Curriculum Project has described as the “public consequence” of knowledge production and dissemination?
Since applying for and receiving the Huckabay award, I have developed the course materials by building from my research areas in Chicano/a literature and critical pedagogy. In addition, my course design employed the critical insights culled from my participation with both the UW Simpson Center’s Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students and from the discussions that emerged from PAGE meetings at the Imagining America conference over the past four years. In Fall 2008, I landed an unexpected teaching opportunity to teach a version of the course through an online Chicano/a literature class. This course allowed me to explore the core subject matter of my proposed Huckabay project with students from different parts of the country and challenged my own pedagogical approach to subject matter in the virtual environment (think: Podcast! Placing digitized presentations from the Imagining America 2008 conference in dialogue with course material! Leading students on virtual tours of various Chicano/a exhibits!). Even so, I was still not fully able to perform the biggest element of the Huckabay project that I had proposed: cultivating critical service-learning practices that enable sustained engagement between university and community.
This quarter (Winter 2009) is now my fellowship quarter. Along with nine other fellows, I am attending the course that all fellows are required to take : “Teaching Mentorship Seminar: Being Mentored, Becoming a Mentor.” Whereas most Huckabay fellows are using this quarter either to develop the course or to teach the course, I am able to use this time to research other issues surrounding the course design. I now realize that there are many other issues that are related to the implementation of a course that often go unexplored because of the sheer lack of time. After being assigned a course to teach, coughing up a syllabus, and implementing the course, one has little if any time for other important concerns. Some of the lines of inquiry that I will pursue this quarter include the following: What kinds of community sites would be of interest to my students? What time during the week should such a course convene that would match the schedules of everyone involved? What university office do I approach when trying to offer course credit for students who are not enrolled at the UW? What would it take to get a cross-listed course approved by both my department (English) and American Ethnic Studies? What models exist for negotiating the administrative and instructor duties involved with implementing an exploratory model of instructor-lead curricular design?
These issues of institutional negotiation are ones that I now identify as crucial in my role not only as a teacher who is trying to challenge traditional service-learning and classroom approaches to disciplinary material—but also as an activist, who seeks to fundamentally change the way that the university positions itself vis-à-vis its surrounding community. Throughout this quarter, I plan to talk with a number of institutional members. Carlson Center Director Michaelann Jundt will help me explore site options. Associate Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Juan Guerra is my lead mentor on the project, and will help me explore issues of reciprocity and the ethics of community engagement. Meetings with the Chairs of both my home department of English and the Department of American Ethnic Studies will help me as I explore dual department credit. The Office of Student Services and the Registrar will tell me where to go to petition for community member course credit. I am in the process of pitching my course to the Cornish College of the Arts who I think might be more receptive to exploring community engagement in a small liberal arts setting. Next week, I will be attending the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities as one of the ten K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders; there, I will have the opportunity to engage with like-minded administrators and faculty on the subject of diversity, community-engagement, and the expanding role of the university. And still there are a number of different community sites outside of the university that I have to explore on my own, through my connections in the communities that I personally participate within on a daily basis. Though, they may seem to have little connection with my academic life, they are actually integral to the ways that I see my own institutional and pedagogical role…
Like Dana Edell’s discussion of her own civically-engaged project, I too am committed to working alongside students (be they sanctioned R-1 undergraduates or students from various communities outside of the university) and exploring the changing shape of university-community relations in practice and in scholarship. However, I believe that in order for teachers to take such a role in changing institutional practices, we need to allocate the space to explore and to negotiate the buffers and byways within both the community and the academy.
How can we, as emerging scholars and administrators, help to institutionalize and ensure the needed space for the increasingly varied nature of teaching, research, and leadership? If junior faculty members feel institutionally gagged – i.e., unable to advocate for institutional change until they have tenure – can our position as graduate students serve as a unique platform from which to advocate for such change at our home institutions?
With reference to this particular forum, can this website, this discussion board, facilitate the critical and engaged reflections that we have discussed at the PAGE Summit over the years to explore our expanding and changing roles in an increasingly globalized environment?
What do you think?
Post a comment, ask a question, tie in some literature, relate your own experience from the field… Go to www.pageia.blogspot.com.
To make suggestions about the site, the blog, or to submit your own essay about public scholarship in the arts, design, or the humanities, email Kevin Bott at kbott@syr.edu
