The Trouble with Service-Learning

1. The Trouble with Service-Learning Possibilities, limitations and challenges for ethical relationality with community partners Judy Bruce, University of Canterbury University of Oulu, Finland

2. Situated with community engagement movement • Is it a social movement presented as an answer; or an intellectual presented as a question? (Butin, 2011) Service-learning

3. Service-learning possibilities

4. There are privileged and underprivileged people. Those who have ought to give charity and help to those in need. • Our students (the servers) involved in S-L projects are perceived as knowers, helpers and experts • Those whom they work with (the served) are seen as without knowledge, and in need of help • Concerned with learning ABOUT the Other (stranger) in order to change the Other Traditional service-learning

5. Seeks to address the critique of tradition projects through challenging root causes of poverty and injustice. • The goal is to develop critical thinkers and actors who can advance issues of justice. • Concerned with learning ABOUT the Other in order to help • There is still the server-served dichotomy. • Students (the server) are seen as knowers and helpers who can bring about more fair, equitable and just change. Critical service-learning

6. Trad and critical S-L projects focus on the idea of learning ABOUT the Other in order to help or to change the Other • Can we consider ways of reframing SL outside ides of humanistic pursuits of universalism and sameness, beyond projects of self-betterment, and beyond notions of oppression? The trouble with S-L

7. Based on rational understandings of communities: • Either devouring difference • Vomiting out • Some post-modern communities may allow difference to exist alongside (as long as the normative remains unaltered) • 4th possibility: that we are altered by a radical encounter with Other The trouble with S-L

8. The troube with S-L

9. Challenges the server-served dichotomy • Acknowledges Other as a knower, helper and giver • Concerned with being taught by the Other • Requires from the student a humility and openness to learn from Others; a willingness to be altered • Acknowledgement that this is a troubling space Postcritical/relational S-L

10. Concerned with being taught by the Other To approach the Other in conversation…is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other…is an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain (Levinas, p.51) Postcritical/relational S-L

11. Requires from the student a humility and openness to learn from Others; a willingness to be altered I cannot help but be intrigued, not in the sense of wanting to grasp the unknown and lock it down to knowledge, but in the sense of yearning for the teaching that only the Other can provide (Kirby, 2009, p.164). Postcritical/relational S-L

12. Acknowledgement that this is a troubling space Regarding communication and transcendence one can only speak of their uncertainty. Communication is an adventure of subjectivity, different from that which is dominated by a concern to recover itself, different from that of coinciding in consciousness; it will involve uncertainty. It is by virtue of its eidos possible only in sacrifice, which is the approach of him for which one is responsible. Communication with the other can only be transcendent as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run (Levinas, p.120). Postcritical/relational S-L

13. Postcritical S-L an attempt to: • reframe S-L outside of terms of oppression, and beyond universality and rationality • reframe S-L beyond projects of self-betterment and self-cultivation, and beyond relativistic accounts of difference • work toward discursive practices through engagement with alterity beyond the normative Conclusion

14. Service-learning possibilities