2016 Upper Midwest Civic Engagement Summit

This session will challenge our thinking about higher education community engagement. The first hour of the session will have about 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of discussion. In the presentation I will question the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of four core concepts of service learning: learning, service, community, and change. "Institutionalized service learning," the dominant form of service learning in higher education, puts student learning first, service second, community third, and change last. Furthermore, "learning" emphasizes a distorted version of experiential learning theory, "service" emphasizes a disempowering charity approach, "community" is based on an alienated exchange relationship model, and "change" is based on a neoliberal individualistic philosophy. The alternative, "liberating service learning," reverses the prioritization of the concepts, beginning with change, then community, then service, then learning. The theory of change recognizes the importance of structural conflicts in society, the theory of community emphasizes a unitary rather than exchange model, the theory of service draws from community organizing and development models, and the theory of learning works from popular education and focuses on constituencies and communities as much as students. In the second hour of the session participants will work in small groups to first brainstorm ways of implementing the "liberating" model, and briefly report back to the large group. Then they will identify knowledge, skill, and resource gaps that may prevent full implementation, again with brief report backs.