CHAPTER 5: Service-Learning: An Exportable Pedagogy?

For over seventeen years, I have designed and taught political science courses with service-learning components. I also founded and served as the first director of a university-wide center established to support service-learning and civic engagement opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners. In my tripartite role as professor, administrator, and community-builder, I have used the service-learning approach because I find it useful in achieving a myriad of educationally related goals. From a teaching perspective, service-learning aids in the development of students’ critical thinking, moral reasoning skills, comprehension of discipline-based and interdisciplinary knowledge, communication skills (written and oral), and awareness of their role as citizens, from the local to the global level. From my perspective, effective implementation of the pedagogy facilitates interdisciplinary teaching and research and draws together faculty who seek to enhance their students’ understanding of worldwide issues and problems not neatly confined within disciplinary bodies of study. Service-learning is also an important method through which universities can work in communion with partners beyond the confines of the campus for the sake of improving the political, cultural, and socio-economic structures that should support the lives of individuals, families, and the communities that constitute our immediate surroundings and connect to other communities worldwide. Like ethicist Martha Nussbaum (1997), I believe that education can and should draw “citizens toward one another by complex mutual understanding and individual self-scrutiny” and build upon “a democratic culture that is truly deliberative and reflective, rather than simply the collision of unexamined preferences” (p. 10). Servicelearning is, therefore, a very useful means through which students can come to see themselves as individuals whose well-being is fundamentally dependent upon the welfare of other beings, and to accept their responsibility in aiding the process whereby democratic forms of government may more fully realize their potential to address the needs and aspirations of people throughout the world. Service-learning can also assist educators in the process whereby students learn how to become respectful, thoughtful, and active citizens within a local and global context.