From Service to Solidarity: On the (Im)Possibilities of Liberative Service-Learning

Abstract

In this paper I argue that service-learning should be understood as an invitation to solidarity. After reviewing critiques of “traditional” and “critical” service-learning, I provide a description of solidarity as formulated in the work of Peter Hans Kolvenbach, SJ, Paulo Freire, and Pope Francis. This description describes solidarity as developing authentic relationships that emerge via experiences of encounter, perdure over time, and entail both risk and love while pursuing social justice and mutual flourishing. Such solidarity requires, in the words of Keri Day, the “undoing” of our neoliberal selves and new, unpredictable moral formations in the context of authentic relationships.

Keywords:

• Service-learning
• critical-service learning
• solidarity

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In both these instances I was responsible for organizing and administering the programs described. In the first vignette, I was a chaplain at a Jesuit liberal arts college. In the second, I was a member of the diversity, equity, and inclusion office at a regional campus of a state university. In each instance the programs were developed with institutional mission, social justice, and transformative community-engaged learning in mind. In preparation for their on-the-ground experiences, students participated in a series of classroom opportunities to learn about the injustices these organizations were addressing as well as frameworks for conceiving structural transformation that explained, in part, the work of the organizations. These stories include changed names and details to maintain anonymity, but the general arc of the stories remain true to the experience of particular students who participated in these programs.

2 For an early and oft-cited and taught argument along these lines see Eby (1998).

3 See, for example, Lewis (2004).

4 Peter Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education,” Keynote address delivered at the conference “Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education” at Santa Clara University on October 6, 2000. This speech is easily accessible via an internet search. For example, the video and text of the speech can be found on the Santa Clara University website here: https://www.scu.edu/ic/programs/ignatian-worldview/kolvenbach/ (accessed February 11, 2023).

5 For more on how neoliberalism shapes us as moral agents see Day (2015).

6 Day (2021), chap. 4, EBSCOhost. She writes, “For me, being undone…requires others. Other bodies. Other narratives. Other stories. Different lives. Practices of witnessing. Mutual vulnerability that resists control. And inside of these fleshly encounters, something happens to you. In you, around you, through you. Being undone is a vulnerable space in which to reside as you lose control of your ability to dictate and determine the affective, felt encounter. Being undone requires a space where people are encountering each other face-to-face, where the substance of our different and sometimes conflicting lives collide, where one not only thinks about others but feels others on their own terms, where stories are being told that shock and surprise and pull us out of our fundamentalist presuppositions, where vulnerability is expressed through practices of witnessing. Being undone is risky.”

7 Morton and Bergbauer describe the service-learning experience in this way: “The projects are intended to provoke reflection more than to teach principles of community-based research. Students learn to gather the stories of others by speaking and listening to one another. The students have deep and personal discussions of political matters such as race, class, gender, education, inequality, and freedom and incarceration as well as personal matters such as food, basketball, music, family, core values, and life goals. They practice listening with compassion to one another. The depth of conversation is often humbling and moving and sometimes transformational. It is also energizing, and motivates students to articulate their own truths and practice acting on those truths.” Morton and Bergbauer (2015).

8 Interview conducted with Keith Morton via Zoom on March 8, 2024.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James W. McCarty

James W. McCarty: Clinical Assistant Professor of Religion and Conflict Transformation, Director, Tom Porter Religion and Conflict Transformation Program, Boston University [email protected]