The Post/Colonial Work of Service-Learning

• In Event: 32.069 - The Postcolonial And: Interstices and Liberation Across Educational Spaces

Abstract

Many students who want to “make a difference” engage in service-learning, a pedagogical tool where students combine academic learning with community service experiences to learn more about a particular discipline and gain a “sense of civic responsibility” (Bringle & Hatcher, 1996, p. 222). As service-learning has been lauded for increasing college students’ academic performance, leadership and self-efficacy as well as encouraging students’ commitment to activism and understanding of racial difference (Astin, Vogelgesang, Ikeda, & Yee, 2000; Marullo, 1998), it is also criticized for the power dynamics upon which it is predicated (Cann & McCloskey, 2015). Particularly, the vast majority of service-learners have been white and middle-class while service sites tend to be in low-income communities of color (Butin, 2010). Questioning these imbalanced dynamics, some studies show that service-learning reinforces students’ white privilege and colorblind racism (Becker & Paul, 2015; Cann & McCloskey).
In this paper, I theorize how service-learning is entangled with post/colonial practices due to the racial and economic stratification between students and the people they engaged at community sites. Using a Fanonian (2008) frame, I contend that students long for both extrication from colonialism through connection with “Others” and attachment to race and class-based hierarchies that continue to reinforce alienation.
To highlight how post/colonial postures operate in a college service-learning classroom, I analyze students’ stories of their interactions at service placements, detailing how the race and class dynamics that students shared were informed by conflicting desires. Namely, as service-learners wanted to “help” those they saw as lacking resources, they simultaneously began to question their role of helping. And, as they projected their assumptions about how to structure effective educational environments onto the community sites (thereby reinforcing the assimilation of low-income youth of color to white, capitalist, middle-class norms), they also troubled these same hegemonic norms. Unmasking the tensions and contradictions of how students wrestle with post/colonial educational practices raises critical questions for the pedagogy of service-learning and has the possibility of creating more critical avenues for social justice education.
References
Astin, A. W., Vogelgesang, L. J., Ikeda, E. K., & Yee, J. A. (2000). How service-learning affects
students. Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles, Higher Education Research Institute.
Becker, S., & Paul, C. (2015). “It didn’t seem like race mattered” Exploring the implications of service-learning pedagogy for reproducing or challenging color-blind racism. Teaching Sociology, 43(3), 184-200.
Bringle, R. G., & Hatcher, J. A. (1996). Implementing service-learning in higher education. The Journal of Higher Education, 221-239.
Butin, D. (2010). Service-learning in theory and practice: The future of community engagement in higher education. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cann, C. N., & McCloskey, E. (2015). The poverty pimpin’ project: How whiteness profits from
black and brown bodies in community service programs. Race Ethnicity and
Education, 1-15.
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press.
Marullo, S., & Edwards, B. (2000). From charity to justice: The potential of university-community collaboration for social change. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(5), 895-912.

Author

• Colleen Rost-Banik, Windward Community College