Pay It Forward: Possibilities and Poignancies of Feminist Service-Learning Enacted in a Collegiate Health Education Classroom

• In Event: 70.035 - Feminist Community Engagement: Achieving Praxis

Abstract

Service-learning and student philanthropy initiatives are increasing on college campuses as a way to introduce students to civic engagement, social responsibility and community involvement. Feminist educators have historically avoided these types of pedagogical opportunities, favoring more activist-oriented strategies. Yet, service-learning, and in particular, student philanthropy, when enacted by educators using a feminist lens can provide a platform for introducing and discussing feminist principles and moving students past volunteerism towards social action. In this paper, Seher first provides an overview of student philanthropy broadly, and Pay-It-Forward (PIF) in particular, as a service-learning initiative that connects college students to non-profit agencies in their local community. She then employs a feminist lens as she reflects upon the implementation of a student philanthropy project in her senior-level community nutrition course. Using a feminist lens to reflect critically on this effort, she offers discussion of lessons learned in order to facilitate dialogue about the possibilities of feminist student philanthropy. She offers her story and reflection, as a junior faculty member and emerging feminist scholar, in the hopes that it sparks a discussion – most acutely on the potential for feminist student philanthropy, and the possibility for feminist community engagement. More broadly, Seher hopes to provoke thought on the ways in which feminist identity emerges, on the process of becoming a feminist educator, and on the fluidity and tensions experienced in this journey.

Author

• Christin L Seher, The University of Akron