Educating Amateurs While Preparing Professionals? Prioritizing Dewey's Sense of the Public in Community-Based Internship Programs

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Eleven
  In Roundtable Session: Education of the Whole Person and Flourishing (Table 12)

Abstract

What are ‘good public outcomes,’ for service-learning and community engagement in higher education? It might depend on what we mean by public, and whether or not we can resist the privatization of the public. This paper considers the relevance of understanding public and private for experiential learning by reflecting on the progressive origins of this debate, and its implications for structuring a hybridized service-learning and internship program. Through analysis of student work and stakeholder interviews, authors found the private goals of internships dominated, but outcomes that may be considered public from a Deweyan perspective, such as critical analysis of social problems, calls to citizen action, and communal association, were important program outcomes. Implications for Dewey’s description of vocations are discussed.

Author

• Marie G. Sandy, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
  Presenting Author