Building Relationships for Critical Service-Learning

Abstract

Servicelearning is a pedagogical approach that higher education can use to promote civic engagement among students, but it has not fully realized its original civic purpose. Butin (2010) argues that to meet its civic mission, servicelearning must move toward a more justiceoriented pedagogy that empowers stakeholders to bring about social change. To that end, we worked toward a more critical model of servicelearning, first proposed by Mitchell (2008), that encourages a social change approach to servicelearning. We propose that students’ relationships with their professors, community partners, and peer mentors help facilitate this goal. We examined how these three types of relationship impacted students’ civic engagement. Results demonstrated that each type of relationship had a different impact on students’ developing civic engagement attitudes. This article discusses how such relationships can help achieve critical servicelearning’s goal of developing more participatory and transformational citizens. Servicelearning represents an important pedagogical approach that higher education can use to promote civic engagement among students (Duncan & Kopperud, 2008). Civic engagement, defined by Thomas Ehrlich (2000), is using political and nonpolitical means to engage with a community to make a positive difference in the quality of life for members of that community. Higher education is uniquely positioned to encourage civic engagement because it can provide students with a space to recognize injustice and inequality, to obtain skills to speak and act on unchallenged systems, and to gain intercultural competencies to promote public action (Musil, 2009). We propose that servicelearning students’ relationships with their professors, community partners, and peer mentors further develop their civic engagement attitudes. Research demonstrates a wide range of benefits of servicelearning for students including significant gains in social skills, academic performance, personal insight, and cognitive development (Celio et al., 2011; Yorio & Feifei, 2012). These benefits in student outcomes reveal the positive impact of servicelearning coursework on students’ personal and professional development (Butin, 2010). Such glowing findings might mislead us into thinking servicelearning has only positive outcomes. A significant number of theorists and researchers have 22 | DEBRA HARKINS, LAUREN GRENIER, CYNTHIA IRIZARRY, ELIZABETH ROBINSON, SUKANYA RAY, and LYNNE-MARIE SHEA cautioned that the potential for servicelearning to create transformative change may instead represent only ameliorative change that unintentionally reinforces or even strengthens power imbalances (BoyleBaise, 1999; Cross, 2005; Himley, 2004; Hullender et al., 2015; Rosenberg, 1997; Sleeter, 2001; Varlotta, 1997). Critical servicelearning pedagogy addresses these concerns and aims to promote social justice by educating students on how to deconstruct theoretically, empirically, and practically the power structures that underlie many traditional views of the world (Campus Compact, 2000). A specific focus of critical servicelearning pedagogy is on the power dynamics that exist between those with the power and privilege to help and the recipients of that help, who often have far less power and privilege. This transformative learning requires a shift from taking for granted assumptions about how the world works to a more critical stance, questioning one’s assumptions while seeking more inclusive and reflective thoughts that can guide one toward more socially just action (Baxter Magolda & Boes, 2017; Brukardt et al., 2004; Butin, 2010; Campus Compact, 2000; Kegan, 2000; Mitchell, 2008; O’Meara & Niehaus, 2009; Saltmarsh & Harley, 2008; Varlotta, 1997). Critical servicelearning is a model that adopts a social justice framework, as opposed to a more “apolitical helper” model of servicelearning, and demands an analysis of power structures and social change (Mitchell, 2008; O’Meara & Niehaus, 2009; Rice & Pollack, 2000; Rosenberger, 2000). A critical model of servicelearning includes: (a) providing a social change orientation; (b) working to redistribute power; and (c) developing authentic relationships. Mitchell (2008) states that these authentic relationships challenge the selfother binary, emphasizing interdependence and reciprocity, and demand an analysis of both power structures and social change. A major focus of this study is to understand how servicelearning students’ relationships facilitate critical servicelearning, specifically when it comes to the students’ civic engagement attitudes. We explored the relationships between the students and their teachers, their community partners, and their peer mentors. Researchers find extensive evidence that relationships often occur through formalized mentoring (Fassinger, 1997; Hay, 1995). Within higher education specifically, peer mentoring of undergraduate students increases their sense of belonging, competence, identity, professional development, academic learning, and social responsibility (Bernier et al., 2005; Campbell et al., 2012; Parks, 2000; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). We define servicelearning mentoring as a relationally focused process that supports students’ professional, social, and civic development through reflection on what it means to help, the role of power in helping, and how personal values influence helping (Harkins, 2017). While there is substantial literature supporting mentoring models (DuBois et al., 2011; Lunsford et al., 2017), integrating peermentoring into a servicelearning classroom is not common practice. We found only one study that examined peermentoring for servicelearning students (Haddock et al., 2013), and the focus was on the mentors (college students) rather than the mentees (exclusively atrisk college students). For the current study, we explored the impact of three relationships on servicelearning students’ civic attitudes, including civic knowledge, skills, values, behaviors, and identity (Ehrlich, 2000; Hemer & Reason, 2017; TorneyPurta et al., 2015). Service sites included an afterschool tutoring and mentoring program, an urban debate league, and work with an advocacy homelessness organization. A unique component of this study was exploring servicelearning peer mentoring. Peer mentoring included undergraduate students with experience in servicelearning, known as servicelearning assistant mentors (SLAMs), mentoring servicelearners as they MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY SERVICE LEARNING, VOLUME 26, ISSUE 2, PG. 21–38 | 23 worked with a community partner. Based on findings from Robinson and Harkins (2018) regarding components of successful faculty mentoring relationships, faculty helped SLAMs to build an alliance with students through support and motivation. We expected that not only would building relationships with the professor and community partner increase civic engagement attitudes for servicelearners but also students receiving peer mentoring would have attitudes reflected a stronger sense of civic engagement than servicelearners who received no peer mentoring. We predicted associations between relationship quality with SLAMs, professor, and community partners and our outcome variable of civic engagement attitudes.