Selection from:

Karol K Weaver, “Integrating Service Learning into a History of Feminist Theory Course,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 14 (Fall 2003): 45-62.

Service learning is the pedagogical technique whereby students undertake service in order to understand more fully the ideas presented in class lectures or via texts. Service learning traces its founding to the work of twentieth-century educator John Dewey, who sought to establish a connection between students and their larger community so that they would utilize their academic skills to analyze and ultimately improve society. He emphasized the totality of the learning experience, which included both the intellect as well as emotions. Many proponents of service learning also were affected by their participation in social events such as the civil rights movement and the anti-war crusade.

Pedagogically, service learning raises a number of important issues. Many of these concerns are tied to feminist pedagogy as well as to critical pedagogy. Service learning exemplifies the goal of women’s studies pioneers to revolutionize the university. These leaders encouraged greater student involvement in the learning process, labored to diversify the student population and the curriculum, and recognized multiple ways of knowing. Specifically, service learning challenges traditional epistemology by replacing detachment with connectedness. It values subjectivity, a quality that largely has been excluded from the pursuit of knowledge and an attribute that usually has been ascribed to women. Furthermore, service learning questions traditional notions of authority within the classroom. The instructor and the texts that she assigns are no longer the ultimate arbiters of truth; instead, the student’s lived experience contributes to the attainment of knowledge. Economist KimMarie McGoldrick summarizes this questioning of authority by noting that service learning takes “the subject material authority away from the instructor…giving students ownership of the development and application of...theory.” Finally, service learning substitutes activity and engagement for the passivity that epitomizes many college classrooms.

References

Carl I. Fertman, Service Learning for all Students (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1994), 9 and Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer, “In Service of What?: The Politics of Service Learning,” in Service Learning for Youth Empowerment and Social Change, ed. Jeff Claus and Curtis Ogden (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 28.

Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles, Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning?

(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999), 7-8.

Timothy Stanton, Dwight E. Giles, Jr., and Nadinne I. Cruz, Service Learning: A Movement’s Pioneers Reflect on Its Origins, Practice, and Future (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999), 1-52.

Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom: Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Privilege, Expanded Edition ( Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 13.

KimMarie McGoldrick, “The Road Not Taken: Service Learning as an Example of Feminist Pedgogy in Economics,” in Valuing Us All: Feminist Pedagogy and Economics, ed. April Laskey Aerni and KimMarie McGoldrick (Ann Arbor, MI: The Univeristy of Michigan Press, 1999), 174.

For discussions of critical and feminist pedagogies, see Sandra Bell, Marina Morrow, and Evangelia Tastsoglou, “Teaching in Environments of Resistance: Toward a Critical, Feminist, and Antiracist Pedgogy,” in Meeting the Challenge: Innovative Feminist Pedagogies in Action, ed. Maralee Mayberry and Ellen Cronan Rose (London: Routledge, 1999), 23-46; Blythe McVicker Clinchy, “On Critical Thinking and Connected Knowing,” in The Practice of Change: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Women’s Studies, ed. Barbara J. Balliet and Kerrissa Heffernan (Washington, D.C.: American Association for Higher Education, 2000), 9-18; and bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practic eof Freedom (Routledge: New York, 1994).