Real Learning in Service-Learning: Formal Education, Social Participation, and Identity Change

• In Event: Grasping the Elephant: International Perspectives on Truth-Making in Participatory Design Research Projects

Abstract

This paper forms part of a broader research on learning processes and identity change in university students participating in Service-Learning (SL) programs (for more information see Authors, 2018; Authors, 2022; Authors, 2020; Authors, 2021). SL programs are considered as border spaces (McMillan, 2011) because of their hybrid conditions between academic activity settings and intervention professional ones.
Following a 5thD and La Clase Mágica scheme expanded in the UC Links network (Underwood, Marhmood & Vásquez, 2021) these programs, in Barcelona and Seville (Spain), are aimed at educational intervention with children living in neighborhoods with high risk of social exclusion while providing settings for real learning in university students (Simon, 2000). In our empirical study, a total of 66 undergraduate students were tracked (34 in Barcelona and 32 in Seville). They produced more than 600 field notes and those which were considered to provide more comprehensive information were chosen, so 28 (14 from each location) underwent an in-depth qualitative analysis. Following the trajectories of these students, we aimed to show how the socially designed experiments we analyze constitute a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) with its singular practical arrangements, motives and symbolic values.
Using category systems, narrative and dialogical analyses, we tracked how the setting nature, concepts and skills acquisition as well as the students´ subjective identity changes interweave along time and space and as students´ participation becomes more active and socially/affectively involved. The social interaction and affective connections taking place in these spaces, hand in hand with the transformations elicited by tools contained in the activity for metareflection (as field notes), elicit the searched border crossing in the students. Transformations in the activity itself, elicited by the students’ agency and appropriation of shared goals, dance synchronically with epistemological, academic and identity changes in their subjective words.
In line with what we have developed in Author (2020) and Author (2022) and supporting the ideas central to this proposed session, we propose the concept of hybrid psychological agent. With it we theorize that it is through the active participation of people socialized in different “activity scenarios” (meaning, cultures, generations, nationalities, gender, social class, etc.) in a single interactive space, where these individuals generate shared motives and goals and all are able to exert agency, that a dynamic of dialogue is generated among the different “knowledge systems” involved, potentially resulting in bidirectional social transformations. For this to happen a prerequisite is the possibility of emotional and empathic connection with “the other”, provided by tangible interpersonal interaction, which naturally emerges when narratives and communicative languages that transcend rationality come into play (as those involved in play, humor and art). We show these processes through the analysis of our undergraduates´ border crossing in our empirical study.

Authors

• Beatriz Macias Gomez-Estern, Universidad Pablo de Olavide
  Presenting Author

• Virginia Martínez-Lozano, University Pablo de Olavide
  Presenting Author

• Jose Luis Lalueza, Autonomous University of Barcelona
  Presenting Author

• David Garcia Romero
  Presenting Author