Why "Where" Matters: Exploring the Role of Space in Service-Learning

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Service-Learning: Why, Where, and How We Realize and Report Benefits

Abstract

This paper culminates a two-year qualitative case study concerning how 33 students in a service-learning course understood poverty while preparing taxes for low-income families. Because the tax site communities become community partners in their own right, this research takes up Clark & Young’s (2005) call to attend to service-learning’s spatial effects. It finds that the ‘where’ of service-learning matters greatly given that service placements—particularly in hometowns or college communities—cause students to interact in the spaces served in new ways. Service-learning encourages an unpacking of the geographies of power (e.g. ghettos, ‘safe neighborhoods,’ etc.) that are mapped onto particular spaces. By attending to conceptualizations of communities, service-learning helps students tease out spatial inequities that are power-laden.

Author

• Megan Snider Bailey, The University of Alabama