Chapter 8: Service and Scholarship: How Opportunities to “Give Back” Foster Culturally Responsive and Respectful Research Projects

A deficit discourse about race and intelligence, race and academic achievement, and race and social mobility has plagued academic scholarship for many years (Milner, 2007; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001). This misplaced blaming of the victim has fixated the academy and ultimately prevented the academy from providing informed analyses to help resolve inequities in the U.S. (Ladson-Billings, 2006). The greatest challenge is that there is a lack of culturally sensitive research that situates cultural knowledge as the core of the research investigation and analyses (Tillman, 2002). As a result, scholars such as critical race theorists are calling for researchers to become more culturally aware in order to “advance the research literature in ways that validate and give voice to people who have often been silenced, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and placed on the margins” (Milner, 2007, p. 397). In this chapter, I am suggesting that scholar service is a potential avenue in which scholars gain greater cultural knowledge of school communities of color. Service, as a form of experiential learning, can lead to greater cultural knowledge and understanding of school communities of color, particularly if that service experience is coupled with immersion in the appropriate literatures on race, culture, and structural inequality. In the pages that follow, I will first share why scholar service is one way to provide restitution for the misplaced blaming of the victim and the ensuing lack of informed analyses. Then, through my own service experiences, I will also share how an added benefit of service provision is greater cultural knowledge that can be utilized in research investigations. Last, I will discuss the challenges of this servicescholarship approach through reflections on a case study that I conducted as a result of my service experiences.