Who's Serving Whom? Partners, Process, and Products in Service-Learning Projects in South African Urban Geography

Abstract

The literature on service learning in geography courses has established and substantiated the importance and usefulness of such projects for student learning. In this paper the assumption is questioned that similar sets of benefits accrue to ‘community’ participants, those involved who are located outside the university context. The research undertaken demonstrates that projects, and the research or ‘service’ that they produce, are embedded in more complicated sociopolitical terrain that reflects not only the relationship between university and community, but also the complex ways in which organizations link to ‘communities’ and residents with complex local identities and interests. Analysis of this topography demonstrates the context-specific structuring of partnerships, research processes and the consequent diverse ‘after-lives’ of any research products that are produced.

Keywords:

• Urban geography
• service learning
• community benefits
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

Thanks are offered first to the community-, NGO- and university-based project participants in the service-learning projects (2000–2005) that inspired this paper. Special thanks are also due to the JET-CHESP Service Learning Project for funding the research, and to Janice McMillan and Suellen Shay from the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town for organizing and creating, with the other project researchers, an encouraging and critical context in which to reflect on our teaching practice.

Notes

¹ The terms ‘African’ and ‘coloured’ are used to refer to apartheid-era racial classifications used in the designation of segregated neighbourhoods and for individual racial classification by the then South African government. Although not legal classifications today, they continue to be used to explain racial divisions in South African cities in the contemporary period.

² For a fuller discussion of student learning in these projects see Oldfield (2006).