In the Service of What? The Politics of Service Learning

Abstract

the service of is a question that inevitably merits the attention of teachers, policy makers, and academicians who take seriously the idea that learning and service reinforce each other and should come together in America's schools, Messrs. Kahne and Westheimer suggest. In his inaugural address, President John Kennedy challenged the nation with his well-known appeal: . . ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. Two decades later, in a campaign speech, Ronald Reagan asked, Are you better off today than you were four years ago? If Kennedy's exhortation reflected the idealism and sense of collective mission that characterized the tumultuous 1960s, Reagan's question epitomized the individualism and materialism of the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, a glimmer of Kennedy's notion of service to the community and the nation is reemerging in schools in the form of service learning. Educators and legislators alike maintain that service learning can improve the community and invigorate the classroom, providing rich educational experiences for students at all levels of schooling. Service learning makes students active participants in service projects that aim to respond to the needs of the community while furthering the academic goals of students. Students in a service learning project might analyze and monitor the composition of nearby swamplands or produce an oral history of their community. They might work with the homeless or initiate a cross-age tutoring project. In addition to helping those they serve, such service learning activities seek to promote students' self-esteem, to develop higher-order thinking skills, to make use of multiple abilities, and to provide authentic learning experiences - all goals of current curriculum reform efforts. Recognizing the potential of service learning, policy makers, legislators, and educators have promoted initiatives at the local, state, and national levels. The National and Community Service Act of 1990 and President Clinton's National Service Trust Act of 1993 are some recent and far-reaching examples of this trend. Millions of dollars have been targeted for educators around the country, and many service learning programs are supported by city- and statewide initiatives.(1) As is commonly the case with new policy initiatives, however, more attention has been focused on moving forward than on asking where we are headed. While service learning advocates rush to forge coalitions and find a shared vocabulary that accommodates multiple agendas and while practitioners and researchers begin to work on difficult implementation and evaluation issues, educators from schoolhouse to university to state house are neglecting to answer the most fundamental question: In the service of what? Proponents of service learning have worked to find common ground between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, business leaders and community activists. Edward Kennedy, Bill Clinton, George Bush, William F. Buckley, and Ralph Nader have all gone on record as strong advocates of service learning in American schools. Yet controversial issues surrounding the means and ends of service learning have been pushed to the background. What values do service learning curricula model and seek to promote? What kinds of social and political relations do they ask students to imagine? What kinds of relationships develop between students and those they serve? What kind of society does service learning lead students to work toward? With the current interest in and allocation of resources to service learning comes a growing need to clarify the ideological perspectives that underlie service learning programs. Drawing on our yearlong study of two dozen K-12 teachers who took part in a university-based effort to promote service learning in area schools, we propose a conceptual scheme that highlights different rationales for service learning. …