Service Learning

Abstract: In light of critiques regarding the concept of service, and after highlighting limits of critical service-learning and "authentic" relationship approaches, this article presents "making space" for marginalized community perspectives as an alternative metaphor for conceptualizing university-community relationships. Drawing upon multiple experiences with American Indian tribal nations, the article identifies deeply intercultural, counterhegemonic, and decolonizing dynamics enacted through making space, and which produce a discomforting reversal of the common analytic focus on community service recipients. Making space also enables university-community alignment, the generation of projects truly based in community interests, and facilitates interactions outside and disruptive of hegemonic power/knowledge regimes and discourses. - See more at: https://gsn.nylc.org/links/2336#sthash.uYkU8tee.dpuf

Author: Diana Natalicio
Abstract: Over the last twenty years, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) has pursued a comprehensive strategy to move the institution from isolation from its surroundings, to an active and enthusiastic engagement with its many community stakeholders. Thus, we began in the late 1980's with, among other initiatives, efforts to (1) recruit a student body that better responded to the educational needs -- and mirrored the demographics -- of this undereducated region; (2) establish the El Paso Collaborative to raise educational aspirations and attainment among all young people in the region; (3) develop graduate programs for place-bound residents of the region; (4) build research infrastructure to attract and retain highly competitive faculty members; (5) develop powerful pedagogies such as service learning, undergraduate research experiences and honors programs; and, most recently, (6) develop the "student success in the middle years" initiative to increase degree completion. In sum, UTEP pursues an institution-wide commitment to engagement. The concept of civic engagement thus has multi-leveled significance, incorporating not only opportunities that are afforded students and faculty to connect with and learn from the community, which is what Campus Compact has focused on, but also the transformation of an entire university into a "context-sensitive" organization, responding to and seeking opportunities to engage deeply and over a sustained period of time with the region it serves, and serving as a model for other urban, minority-serving institutions. - See more at: https://gsn.nylc.org/links/1153#sthash.W7d6U5gN.dpuf