Abstract
This chapter describes the service-learning experience of the author in a graduate-level service-learning course for education students. It explains how that experience stimulated critical reflection on positionality and practice as a social justice-oriented educator-researcher who plans to conduct community-based collaborative research with teachers and students. The author approached the course with a critical perspective and endeavored to engage in service learning cautiously, careful to recognize and resist colonial assumptions, dynamics, and practices. In addition to its impact upon the author's development as a researcher, this chapter discusses how the service-learning experience also prompted deeper consideration of the ways in which pedagogy, knowledge production, and social justice transformation are linked, especially in a postcolonial framework. This chapter concludes with recommendations for doctoral students who are preparing for scholarly practice, and for researchers who seek to expand the current understanding of service learning with graduate students.
TopBackground: Contextualizing The Service-Learning Experience
Like about half of my classmates, I took the community service-learning course in the fall semester of the second year of my Ph.D. in education program. Before entering the Ph.D. program, I worked as a high school history teacher, an assistant principal, and a K-12 district curriculum and instruction administrator for just over 20 years. Four years into my career as a teacher, I took a hiatus from teaching to earn a master's degree in history, focusing on race, gender, and social movements in the United States. That program influenced my career trajectory and my intellectual and moral development in the years to come. I went on to work at the intersection of K-12 education and academic history. In both the classroom and institutional leadership roles, I tried to envision and foster a transformative history pedagogy. For me, transformative history pedagogy means the following: students are active constructors of historical knowledge (Wineburg, 1999; Wineburg & Reisman, 2015), historical inquiry is relevant to students’ identities and interests (Paris, 2012), teaching and learning contends critically with racial oppression and its impact on students and their learning (Dozono, 2021), and the objective of this critical disciplinary teaching and learning is meaningful social change (Ladson-Billings, 2014). My reason for returning to graduate school and my intended research dissertation project relate directly to the goal of working toward a vision for transformative history pedagogy in classroom-based collaborative research.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Justice: The identification of and resistance to systemic oppression. Also, the creation of a fair and equitable society.
Research Ethics: Values and rules that govern the practice of research to ensure that it does not do harm.
Intersectional Organizing: Social movement structure that organizes groups around a set of shared values, rather than a single issue or social position, and includes diverse participants.
Community Participatory Action Research: Research geared toward action, problem-solving, or social change, that is conducted collaboratively by the people who are experiencing the situation under study.
Experiential Learning: A pedagogy involving students in activity, usually situated in an authentic context, and analytical reflection.
Ethnic Studies: Academic disciplines focused on the study of cultural groups and practices. Also, a movement for institutionalizing these disciplines.