Starting Points for Discussion: Questions and Quotations

To promote some discussion of the various ways that service-learning can challenge
students and teachers, as well as larger university values, we offer the following questions
to drive discussion. (And we encourage you to generate your own questions as well!)
Student experience
1. What are core values you want your students to transfer to their lives during and
after their college study?
2. Do you face resistance to service learning from students? If so, what does this
suggest about your institution or about student attitudes about learning?
Teaching
1. What are ethical implications of assigning required s-l components in your course?
What are ethical implications of connecting a course to a for-profit organization?
2. How has the incorporation of service-learning changed your teaching? (In terms of
personal attitudes, time expenditure, relationship to students, outcomes, etc.)
3. How has service learning caused you to (re)interrogate the role of classroom
teaching in relationship to your larger educational/social beliefs?
Larger university values and relationships
1. Who makes up the true network of actors necessary to get course content or
meaning across in ways which will resonate with students beyond temporary
ownership to more applied understanding?
2. What is the institutional rhetoric of service-learning (in terms of the wording in your
campus mission/vision statement, core curriculum requirements, s-l program
description, individual s-l course descriptions, and/or etc.)?
3. Ideally, how would/should s-l be woven into the fabric of your institution? How
would this transform your students experiences? What would it take to make this a
reality? Who would be involved? What steps are needed?
3. How has service learning brought you into conflict with your programs,
departments, institutions, and larger constituencies?

As an additional way to promote (provoke?) discussion, below are some passages from Zlotkowskis
article.

Whether an institution is a research university, an urban land grant, a liberal arts college,
or a community college, the chances are excellent that its mission encompasses service or
public purpose. Because service learning can--and in some cases does--affect virtually
every aspect of a campuss operations, few other initiatives have the same potential to bring
professed value and practice so thoroughly into alignment (75).
Service learning is concerned with not only transmitting knowledge, but transforming and
extending it as well (72, quoting Ernest Boyers Scholarship Reconsidered).
Service learnings call for reciprocity significantly qualifies the academys traditional claim
to preeminence by virtue of its expertise. In a service learning context, the concept of
expertise encompasses more than theoretical understanding and technical skill; it also
includes the in-depth knowledge that comes from having lived with a problem or set of
circumstances over an extended period of time (64).
Service learning bridges the kind of work characteristic of the classroom--hypothetical,
deductive, reflective--with the kind of work most typical outside it--concreted, inductive,
results-driven (65).
Colleges and universities often find it easier to frame their civic responsibilities in terms
of extension resources, selectively shared resources, special programs, even purchasing and
employment practices. As long as the classroom door can literally and figuratively remain
shut, institutions can accommodate a considerable measure of criticism with little or no
challenge to their traditional structures and self-understanding. Service learning makes
business as usual more difficult (66).
While some faculty may object to experiential assignments as unacceptably vocational,
even more will object to the task of developing engaged citizens as by and large irrelevant
to the specific courses they teach. Like character education, many faculty see citizenship
and democracy skills as matters of personal rather than academic development (70).
The work of faculty is dominated by a set of assumptions including a privileging of research
above all other forms of scholarly activity, a privileging of pure research over applications, a
privileging of specialization above connections and context, and a privileging of the internal
values and priorities of the academy above the needs and concerns of non-members (71,
paraphrasing Eugene Rices Making a Place for the New American Scholar).
It is only through full service learning partnerships that the academy and the community
come together as equals for the purpose of better fulfilling their core missions. Only through
long-term interdependencies is the community invited to become centrally involved in
higher educations obligation to generate and communicate knowledge (73).

Zlotkowski, Edward. Pedagogy and Engagement. In Introduction to Service-Learning Toolkit:

Readings and Resources for Faculty, 2nd ed, 2003. Boston: Campus Compact.