The Wiley International Handbook of Service-Learning for Social Justice

Darren E. Lund, Darren E. Lund

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119144380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

A comprehensive guide to service-learning for social justice written by an international panel of experts

The Wiley International Handbook of Service-Learning for Social Justice offers a review of recent trends in social justice that have been, until recently, marginalized in the field of service-learning. The authors offer a guide for establishing and nurturing social justice in a variety of service-learning programs, and show that incorporating the principles of social justice in service-learning can empower communities to resist and disrupt oppressive power structures, and work for solidarity with host and partner communities.

With contributions from an international panel of experts, the Handbook contains a critique of the field's roots in charity; a review of the problematization of Whitenormativity, paired with the bolstering of diverse voices and perspectives; and information on the embrace of emotional elements including tension, ambiguity, and discomfort.

This important resource:

• Considers the role of the community in service-learning and other community?engaged models of education and practice
• Explores the necessity of disruption and dissonance in service-learning
• Discusses a number of targeted issues that often arise in service-learning contexts
• Offers a practical guide to establishing and nurturing social justice at the heart of an international service-learning program

Written for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, scholars, and educators, The Wiley International Handbook of Service-Learning for Social Justice highlights social justice as a conflict?ridden struggle against inequality, xenophobia, and oppression, and offers practical suggestions for incorporating service-learning programs in various arenas.

Part I
Introduction

The Social Justice Turn in Service‐Learning: Cultivating “Critical Hope” and Engaging with Despair

Kari M. Grain, Assistant Editor, and Darren E. Lund, Editor

Recent global headlines about suicide attacks, xenophobic rhetoric, systemic gun violence, and the continued displacement of those fleeing civil war and environmental catastrophe have foregrounded social justice issues pertaining to race, nationality, socioeconomic status, religion, and a host of other factors. In our view, the pervasive despair of our current historical moment has necessitated the urgent development of the conceptual “social justice turn” in service‐learning. We suggest that our field can neither afford to avoid difficult conversations about social justice, nor ethically stand aside because of a “hope deferred” (Duncan‐Andrade, 2009, p. 4) that deems such issues too overwhelming for a small field such as ours to address. This Handbook represents for us an emblematic stand against – and engagement with – despair. The social justice turn and our introductory notes use as a foundational starting point three trends that have been consistently marginalized but are gaining momentum in our field: (a) critique of the field’s roots in charity; (b) a problematization of White ¹ normativity, paired with the bolstering of diverse voices and perspectives; and (c) the embrace of emotional elements including tension, ambiguity, and discomfort (Grain & Lund, 2016). By enacting a social justice approach, service‐learning has the potential to empower communities, resist and disrupt oppressive power structures, and work for solidarity with host and partner communities. Although themes related to power and privilege are far from new in service‐learning, we suggest an immediate need for a shift from their marginalized position to a more central focus, thereby laying a foundation for an emergent social justice turn. Subsequently, we also offer “critical hope” (Bozalek, Carolissen, Liebowitz, & Boler, 2014; Freire, 2007) as a conceptual space in which service‐learning as a field may simultaneously acknowledge the historical and contextual roots of despair, while using this affective element as a pedagogical and curricular means to engage service‐learning more intentionally as a vehicle for social justice goals. We complete this introductory chapter by outlining some of the rigorous research and innovative approaches to social justice service‐learning that our contributing authors have made to this Handbook. It is only with the unrelenting work of these pedagogues, community partners, researchers, practitioners, and other colleagues that the social justice turn may in some small way facilitate a more hopeful direction for our field.

Engaging with Despair

It was grounds for despair. On September 2, 2015, a three‐year‐old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi ² washed ashore on a Mediterranean beach. The drowning was not an unusual occurrence in the region, as news articles and witness reports had many times made second‐page international headlines, warning of the exodus out of Syria, and calling alarm to the deplorable conditions of human trafficking boats. What made Alan’s story front‐page news, however, was the graphic imagery that quickly invoked in citizens around the world an emotional connection to this victim of civil war and structural inequality. Alan, one child of thousands lost to a circumstance positioned firmly in a larger web of structural restrictions and political conflict, became every person’s child in the global imaginary. Countless public figures saw in Alan a child they knew and loved; former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recalled the moment he and his wife saw the photo, and it evoked memories of their own son at that age (The Canadian Press, 2015). Social media forums erupted with the hashtag #Alankurdi, mourning his death and the circumstances leading up to it, forming support groups for Syrian refugees, and organizing protests. The notorious photograph rendered the Syrian conflict and its consequences more than a distant political story; for many, Alan became an intimate personification of a civil war, and the face that ignited ethical debates about – among other things – who is granted the privilege of mobility, who has the power to patrol borders, what it means to work for social justice, and to what degree each individual, organization, and government is responsible for taking action when humans suffer.

These questions, catalyzed by the death of a child, echoed the work we were doing in putting together this Handbook. In tandem with the hateful rhetoric of far right parties in Europe and elsewhere, and popularized xenophobic responses to the global refugee crisis, the death of Alan Kurdi implored us to ask what the field of service‐learning and community engagement can and ought to do in light of this emotionally charged, highly divisive historical moment. Service‐learning is ideally positioned to put a human face to issues of inequality and human suffering; notions of mobility, power, privilege, and responsibility are especially vital to this field in a time when the global events of recent years have caused a heightened sense of urgency and a widening political divisiveness between constructed binaries of Black and White, migrant and refugee, police officer and citizen, right and left politics, Republican and Democrat, and more broadly, “us and them.” High‐profile suicide attacks in Brussels, Lahore, London, Nice, Ouagadougou, and Manchester (to name only a few), escalating racialized police brutality, mass gun violence, the polarizing rhetoric of political campaigns here and abroad, and the rising rate of political and environmental refugees, have all profoundly shifted the landscape in which service‐learning in higher education operates, and therefore must influence how we respond as educators, scholars, practitioners, and citizens within a field that continually navigates border crossings of all sorts.

It bears accentuating that the challenging nature of our current historical moment is not a new phenomenon, and indeed, marginalized communities have faced myriad struggles for many generations. In fact, although the current political climate seems new partly because it has only recently gained momentum within popular media, issues of racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, colonialism, exploitation, and oppression have been unrelenting for many years. Current injustices underlined by stories such as Alan Kurdi’s, in other words, are far from new, but rather have been in continuous development, each issue of injustice gaining quiet momentum until a photo, a video, or a story finally grips the attention of mainstream media and a broader public. This recent shift – one of increased attention and intensity – demands that educators, practitioners, and institutions take stock; we argue that this has necessitated an organized, conceptual turn in higher education service‐learning – one that is acutely aware of and responsive to inequality and dangerous rhetoric, and one that actively problematizes its own roots and blind spots. The contributors to this Handbook have done just that in their various contributions to this field.

With this increased attention to injustice in mind, we suggest in this Introduction that a social justice turn has (only just) begun in the field of service‐learning, led by critical scholars and pedagogues; if developed intentionally and robustly, this turn will keep the field relevant amid the divisive politics of our current times. Without the social justice turn and its continued bolstering, service‐learning, steeped in a history of White normativity and charity, risks becoming an outdated pedagogy; it could simply lapse into an approach that inadvertently exacerbates intolerance, leaves the heavy lifting to marginalized activists, and omits criticality in favor of naïve hope. This naïve hope, as Freire (2007) forecasted, leads only to despair because it lacks a foundation of political struggle:

Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. But without the struggle, hope, as an ontological need, dissipates, loses its bearings, and turns into hopelessness. And hopelessness can become tragic despair. Hence the need for a kind of education in hope. (p. 3)

Service‐learning is thus poised, via the social justice turn, as a pedagogy that encounters injustice and divisiveness as it occurs in local and global communities, and using as a catalyst these disheartening and enraging events that could comprise grounds for despair, instead fuels itself to engage in political action toward social and economic justice.

Theoretical Framework

Using a theoretical framework inspired by critical social justice pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Kumashiro, 2009; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012) and critical race feminism (Bannerji, 2000; hooks, 2003; Razack, 1998), we outline social justice service‐learning scholarship that has pushed the field toward this conceptual turn, describe the key tenets of the proposed tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Introduction to Service‐Learning for Social Justice
• Part III: Challenging Hegemony through Service‐Learning
• Part IV: Disruption and Dissonance through Service‐Learning
• Part V: Defining and Engaging Community in Service‐Learning
• Part VI: International Engagement through Service‐Learning
• Part VII: The Pedagogy and Practice of Service‐Learning
• Index
• End User License Agreement