A student at Job Corps asks the interviewer, rather plaintively, if Grand Valley students couldn’t come in every day and continue to “teach us about life, help people figure out why they are the way they are. I think this would calm everybody down a little, and we wouldn’t have just violence and drugs to fall back on here.”
Service Learning is a Grand Failure... and it’s a Good Thing, too.
By Michael DeWilde
Despite the steady proliferation of service-learning classes, or classes that have in them some element of service-learning (however broadly defined), there is still something of the ugly stepchild in this movement. Critics on the faculty, of which there are many, remain convinced that these classes lack academic content and rigor, that they smack of social tinkering or liberal meddling, and that they detract from the true mission of the university. That mission, which is teaching and research unstained by activism or volunteerism or other extracurricular activities that interfere with the pursuit of knowledge, need not apologize for following that pursuit in relative comfort and isolation. The primary obligation of students is to learn, to improve themselves by attending to what faculty have to teach and availing themselves of the resources found on campus. To send them back out into the world as volunteers or helpers or whatever before they have had the chance to gain the maturity that comes with serious study, is to do both them and those they would ’serve’ a real disservice. Universities, on this account, best serve the community when they remain faithful to their mission, not when they engage in scattered social work by the incompetent, however well-intentioned.
Faculty are not the only critics. Students who have been forced to “volunteer” when community service has been made a requirement for graduation often deeply resent the lessons they are supposed to have learned and the platitudes they feel compelled to parrot after having “engaged” those outside the hallowed halls. Other students have trouble with the voyeuristic aspects of these classes, the awkwardness not just of showing up to “help” when in fact one has very few skills, but knowing that the teacher will be expecting some observations from this experience that can then be discussed or written about in light of whatever books have been assigned. Still others are concerned that the transient nature of these encounters sends the wrong message all around—the “I’d-like-to-care-if-I-had-the-time-and-if-I-was-going-to-be-here-more-than-a-few-weeks” sense of things that renders many of the stated objectives of service-learning impotent.
So is service-learning a failure? Are the critics right? When students are ill-prepared, coerced, or have only a very short time either in which to serve or reflect, then yes, I would agree with our critics from both sides of the aisle. But there is another experience of service-learning worth exploring, one that results in a failure of a very different sort—a grand, exhilarating failure that is worth repeating on a regular basis.
Service-learning is sometimes categorized in one of the following three ways: It is a kind of volunteerism in which students help out at designated agencies for a period of time during a semester (soup kitchens, basic mentoring, that sort of thing); or it is project-oriented, in that a class takes on a particular goal in some part of the community or for an agency and realizes it by the semester’s end (clearing a lot for a playground, for example); or, finally, it is a vehicle for social change, a determined and usually on-going attempt to change social policy or implement programs that directly address inequities or injustices of one kind or another. This last model not only does not avoid politics, it tends to embrace activities that lead to the greater and more inclusive practice of deliberative democracy.
Of the three, it is this last which lends itself most readily to the kind of grand failure I have in mind, and it is also—unfortunately—the kind that is least in evidence at universities, despite our rhetoric about wanting to turn out more politically savvy graduates.
Since other ambitious, social change model service-learning programs may not agree with my use of the term “grand failure,” I will use as an example the course that has been developed at my university by me and a handful of students. We call it the Community Working Classics, and it is a year-long, political philosophy service-learning seminar in which, among other things, university students organize, develop, implement, and teach classes in the liberal arts to people in institutions such as Job Corps, Project Rehab, and state prisons. The class was borne of the frustration many of our better students were experiencing in regards to their liberal education. They were finding that the very thing that attracted them to their studies in the first place—the careful consideration of words and images to challenge, change, and expand their perceptions of themselves and their world—had become a trap they couldn’t escape, a whirlpool of rhetoric that left them feeling more and more alienated rather than enriched. Too much talk, in other words, about the world, not enough contact with it. They were looking for a proving ground, a place to test the claims we the faculty were making for what we taught, i.e., that they would become critical, humane thinkers able to take their rightful place in the company of educated and powerful men and women who were working to make the world conform to its highest ideals, and who would know how to argue persuasively when there was disagreement about what those ideals might be. They were, they told me, beginning to think this was little more than a variation on the noble lie, and wondered what else we had.
Using Earl Shorris’s Clemente Project as inspiration if not actual guide, we soon found ourselves building an educational program of our own and selling it to various constituencies. Students had as much responsibility for the success or failure of the program as I did, and as much input into what its mission would be. Our goals, as it turned out, were modest enough:
- Examine the value of a liberal education by attempting to teach a core humanities curriculum in places it is usually not found;
- Become more thoughtful, informed, politically active citizen-students;
- Address and where necessary attack racial, class, and gender stereotypes and prejudices;
- Reform the university by more purposefully and forcefully wedding theory to practice;
- Liberate ourselves and those we sought to serve from a life of forced separation and isolation—bridge the gap, in other words, between groups of people who would otherwise never meet and in the process be open to being reformed as well as reforming;
- Let questions emerge organically from the experience of the encounter rather than listening to lectures or reading books that one has no stake in;
- Take a hard and critical look at the systemic injustices that are perpetuated by many of our institutions and reform as necessary;
- As a result of all this make the world a demonstrably better place.
Uh, yeah. At that point none of us had ever heard of service-learning. We were, I think, just trying to save ourselves from two of the by-products of a good liberal education: pervasive self-consciousness and a nagging sense of one’s own utter impotency in the face of the world’s problems.
Amazing things have happened in the ten years we have been running our experiment. People come to our classes. Many people. The waiting list in the prison is considerable. Demand is greater than supply. And when they come—to any of the three places mentioned above—they come with unbridled enthusiasm, high expectations about the nature of the material and our ability to convey it, and very sharp critical abilities. Every single one of the university students who has taught in this program has quickly made their meetings with their students in the community their first priority, and every one has said they do so because the classes there are better than their classes with their peers. The community students have not been socialized to be quiet, to be passive/aggressive, to jump through any particular hoops at the whim of apparent authorities. While this has often gotten those students and inmates into real trouble, and they often lack the discipline and goals our university students have, it does mean they approach the classic texts we provide with an openness, inquisitiveness, and willingness to be taught that can be harder to find among their ostensibly better-prepared peers at college . Their hunger for this material and their response to it has gotten every one of us to look at what we’re teaching with renewed respect, and no one of us would ever think about showing up to one of those community classes unprepared. We’ve even coined a term for the awakening that occurs in us: we call it “the prison epiphany,” something along the lines of what William James meant by the “Aha!” moment. People who visit our classes are shocked by how good they are, and what they mean by that is that they had no idea that these kids in Jobs Corps, or these former addicts, or these prisoners, were so damn, well, smart, or could be so interested in “that stuff.” That they had so many things to say, so many things to teach. One of our more thoughtful seminar students, Matthew Reidsma, reflecting on his first night teaching literature at Project Rehab, wrote about it as follows:
“I suddenly began to wonder what it would be like in the classroom with these men and women, the “addicts.” I glanced up at the doorway, readying myself to go in, when I recalled a few lines from Dante:
’Through me you pass into the city of woe..
Through me among the people lost for aye..
Eternal and eternal I endure...
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’I entered, these lines from the Divine Comedy ringing in my ears. Inside, during the class, I was forced to confront prejudices previously unknown to me. At the end of the first class I found not nine circles, or even Virgil as a guide. What I found was a beautiful juxtaposition with the Inferno. Addicts, yes, but I also found men and women full of life, excitement, and a yearning to learn and talk, to be somebody, to know something or someone. What I found inside Inferno was holy wisdom. I had entered, so I believed, Inferno and yet glimpsed Paradiso.”
And from the other side, in a documentary made about the CWC program by filmmaker J. P. Sniadecki, a student at Job Corps asks the interviewer, rather plaintively, if Grand Valley students couldn’t come in every day and continue to “teach us about life, help people figure out why they are the way they are. I think this would calm everybody down a little, and we wouldn’t have just violence and drugs to fall back on here.” She saw what we were doing there—offering classes in philosophy and literature and psychology—as not just a plausible alternative to the unexamined life but rather as a necessary alternative to what she witnesses everyday. She has hopes that the life of the mind, the way of knowledge and education, can overcome the destructive habits and tendencies of the undisciplined self. Hers is one of the more optimistic assessments of the university I’ve heard in a long time, and it made me think, not for the first time since beginning this program, that interest in the liberal arts is neither dead nor exclusive.
Many more sentiments like these come our way on a regular basis. So given all this positive feedback, wherein lies the grand failure I spoke of earlier? Because it is a year-long course (and some students stick around and work with us longer than that), the euphoria of these bright and shining moments inevitably runs into the realities of entrenched personal or bureaucratic failings. Having gotten a taste of our personal power, and thinking our presence alone—our good will and intelligence and determination —could make the decisive difference, we often instead end up seeing how an institutional whim or a draconian law or an indifferent caseworker or hopeless family situation or economic downturn frustrates our best work. We do make a difference, but it is one that must be fought for and regularly encouraged and only rarely do we approach the goals I outlined above. We have not reformed the university, though each one of us remains more committed to that than ever. We have not reformed the justice system or improved the economic health of the urban poor. We have failed in our larger mission.
But service-learning of this sort, which starts by building longer-term relationships and commitments than most programs, allows students to see what it will take to move from the small world of “helping” to the larger world of systemic change. It allows students (and this faculty member) to take the long view and to continue to wrestle with all that would have to be done, all that would have to be overcome, if we were to realize our highest aspirations. It allows us all time to move from our euphoria and our despair to a middle ground that is responsive to real problems without clinging to false hopes. Service-learning that moves in these ways, that gives students the time and opportunity to draw on all of their talents and learning, that allows them to “fail” even while they excel, deserves the support of us all.