Beyond Pedagogy: Service Learning as Movement Building in Higher Education

Abstract

This article focuses on how service learning can function as a democratizing and empowering approach to pedagogy, research, organizational learning, and community development. The dominant discourse of service learning has evolved into a narrowly-defined alternative pedagogy that promotes student learning and enrichment but very little community development, institutional change, and policy change. For service learning to lead to more meaningful social change, beyond pedagogical innovation, it must be reinvented as a more robust approach including pedagogy, research, organizational learning, and community development. We illustrate weak and robust forms of each of the previously mentioned dimensions with concrete examples from our service-learning work and in particular, from case study research comparing two global service-learning programs in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. We discuss challenges and implications for designing, implementing, and sustaining a more robust approach to service learning, beyond current pedagogical practice and toward social movement learning aimed at policy and institutional change.

Keywords:

• Service learning
• social movements
• higher education

We acknowledge Timothy W. Shenk and Andrea Kiely for their support in reading drafts, and Daniel Carrión for his contributions to research and analysis while a Dana Intern at Ithaca College.

Notes

¹For an additional perspective on radical pedagogy, service learning, and movement-building see Mahoney (2002). Korten's (1990) discussion of community development as a “peoples movement” (p. 113) also provides a useful conceptual framework for developing a movement-building approach to service learning.

²Various publications and professional communities have formed to assist in accumulating knowledge and advancing teaching, research, and scholarship in service learning. See Wingspread Conference's principles of good practice, Special research issue of Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning, and Volumes Advancing Service-Learning Research, as well as many other journals and conferences that take place regionally, nationally and internationally.

³Justicia Global is a grassroots socio-political organization founded and based in the Dominican Republic that works to organize and mobilize people with the objective of building a society characterized by solidarity, equality, justice, and love (see http://www.justiciaglobal.com).

⁴The Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary in New York City offers a model by which a university can dedicate resources and curricula to building a movement to end poverty with leaders at the center of the knowledge-building process (see http://www.povertyinitiative.org). In this model, universities move from community involvement and service learning to engagement and collaboration with social movement organizations alumni and trustees etc.