Chapter 7: Addressing the Problem With Service: Community Formation, Democratization, and Community-Based Learning Pedagogy

This study investigates ethnographically a sociology course that partners with a local organization that advocates for housing policy and the rights of individuals experiencing homelessness. The study seeks to understand how all participants, and not just students, experience and learn through a critical community-partnered pedagogy. Instead of more traditional service models, this pedagogy concentrates on a shifting of conventional power dynamics so that all participants are dialectically teachers and learners. Subsequently, this course addresses the “problem with service” by prioritizing community voices and leadership. Results show that when these diverse subgroups of the course—students, faculty instructor, and community members—join together with a unified purpose two things happen. First, new definitional boundaries of community are established, so that a course community forms over time. Second, the academic discourse becomes a mediation for a broader-ranging democratic purpose.