Chapter 3: Center and Periphery in Service-Learning and Community Engagement: A Postcolonial Approach

Power dynamics are intimately connected to the success of any relationship and are especially critical in developing and sustaining reciprocal engaged partnerships, the foundation for service learning and community engagement. This work explores the theoretical and applied understandings of postcolonial theory and the related constructs of center and periphery as they provide insight into the study of power dynamics in community engagement settings and recognizes the implications of this perspective. Suggestions are offered for improving reciprocity in university-community engagement by viewing research design through a postcolonial lens. Service-learning and community engagement play an important role in higher education throughout the world. Many governments and universities have endeavored to link student learning and research-based scholarship to local issues, and have called for more intentional partnerships (Serpell, 2007). Two important trends have emerged as a result of such rhetoric and initiatives. First, critical perspectives on engagement recognize that interactions between universities and the communities they serve are highly complex, shaped by relations of power and by discourse that privileges university-based knowledge above that of communities (Butler, 2001; Cruz, 2007; Quinn, 2007; Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009; Sandmann, Kliewer, Kim, & Omerikwa, 2010; Smith, 1999). Second, in designing new initiatives to meet community and civic engagement goals, researchers in many settings reference western scholars as the experts in community engagement (e.g., Oldfield, 2008). The scholarly community has at the same time been slow to recognize the value of local knowledge or to identify indigenous experts, particularly in non-Western settings.