Crossing Boundaries: Tension and Transformation in International Service-Learning

Are there better ways to address community challenges than expending funds on international service-learning?In attempting to wed learning and service, are we are exploiting the “other” for new, or recycled, aims?As these questions attest, of all types of service-learning, international service-learning (ISL) most starkly illuminates the tensions between the liberatory and oppressive potentials of practice.This book explores the ramifications of realizing a new age of service-learning that pushes beyond single episodic course-based projects to rebalance student learning and community outcome priorities, and provides insight into what it looks like in its execution. In describing eleven international programs designed to achieve reciprocal, sustained relationships in which learning is co-created, the contributors reveal their struggles to change the balance of power relationships and move to a more transformative practice. Common themes are the developmental nature of this work; the recognition that it takes multiple attempts, often over years, for an individual or an institution to get this work even nearly right; that resolving the challenges of unequal resources, power, and privilege can never be completely erased; and that attention has to be given to the micro-level details.What emerge are seven guiding principles that define the nature of partnerships in liberatory practice, and that apply to all forms of service learning. They must be: strategic--linked to the mission and expertise of the institution; long-term; multifaceted--allowing both partners to play a multiplicity of roles; developmental in building capacities; contextualized in historic and cultural understanding; fully reciprocal; and create the potential for community-driven change.In addressing the problematic nature of ISL, and of service-learning in general, this book interrogates whether its experiences create the necessary conditions for the formation of individual values, convictions, and action; and whether their pivotal teaching and learning moments are indeed replicable and transferable across individual, institutional and even cultural contexts. Its conclusions and insights will be of intense interest to administrators and practitioners alike.

Patrick M. Green has served as the Director of the Center for Experiential Learning at Loyola University Chicago since its inception in August 2007. The Center for Experiential Learning houses five university-wide programs, including service-learning, academic internships, student employment / community-based federal work study, undergraduate research, and the electronic portfolio program. As a Clinical Instructor of Experiential Learning, Dr. Green teaches a variety of general elective experiential learning courses, engaging students in service-learning, community-based research, internship experiences, and undergraduate research. Dr. Green’s research includes the impact of experiential learning programs on skill development and career development (funded by the National Association of Colleges and Employers Research Foundation Grant), the meaning-making processes of reflection in service-learning/experiential learning, and the use of electronic portfolios in experiential learning (Inter/national Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research). Dr. Green was chosen as an Engaged Scholar for National Campus Compact, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSCLE).

Mathew Johnson is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies, and Director of Academic Community Engagement (ACE), at Siena College, having been tenured faculty in the University of Maine System and serving as a Department Chair at West Virginia Wesleyan. He is the founding director of ACE including the Siena VISTA Fellows Program, the Siena Bonner Service Leaders Program, the Academic Service Learning/ Community Based Research Program, the Academic AmeriCorps Program, and International Service Internship Program that, combined, have brought more than 3 million dollars of state, federal, and private investments in community development partnerships throughout New York’s Capital Regio