Sense and Nonsense: Educating Through Service-learning

Opinion by Aysha Bagchi
April 2, 2010, 12:34 a.m.

Sense and Nonsense: Educating Through Service-learningService-learning is in vogue these days. With a majority of Stanford students engaging in some kind of service, it is no wonder we hear the praises of public service and service-learning from official voices regularly. Nonetheless, I sometimes wonder whether the value of service experiences is fully appreciated by all students and particularly by our faculty. Most of our faculty members do not spend much time emphasizing student service activity outside the classroom, leaving students to wonder: is this just a difference in values?

 

Many assume that public service is for young people. In a sense, this is easily understandable: faculty who are pioneering the initiatives and research that are ultimately crucial in the public service arena do not need to be distributing vaccines in Tanzania in order to feel that they are making a difference. Furthermore, faculty are much more likely to have families or other priorities that take precedence. But I do not think these situational differences are enough to explain the divide.

 

Part of the problem may be that service was not a big part of most undergraduate experiences when our professors were undergrads, yet most of them feel that they received wonderful educations. In addition, some professors may fear that student engagement with public service comes at the expense of the learning that takes place in the classroom or may blind us to how our education helps us help others. These are reasonable concerns, but student frustration with the idea of restricting ourselves to a theoretical environment that can seem so distant from urgent problems is also legitimate, and professors would benefit from appreciating its merits.

 

The most neglected attribute of service-learning is the degree to which service makes people more emotionally perceptive, enhancing our ability to empathize and discern the various moral claims surrounding an issue.

 

The easiest example of this I can think of is my service-learning Alternative Spring Break trip last week studying immigration in Arizona with 12 other students. One of the most emotional moments came when we encountered three migrants while collecting trash on migrant trails in the desert. These three men crossed in a group of 20 who were later dispersed by border patrol. They had not eaten in two days, were still less than halfway through the desert after three days and one of them was trying to return to his wife and two children in Tucson after having been deported. Another emotional experience was seeing a handful of young Guatemalan girls around 11 years old escorted into the migrant detention center in Douglas, Ariz. after being apprehended in the U.S. desert. Our group also spoke with border patrol officers who work hard to stop illegal crossing and drug trafficking across the border. We heard from undocumented students at Arizona State University who were brought here as children and spoke of seeking the opportunity to reach for their own dreams.

 

None of these emotional experiences alone answered any of my policy questions about immigration. For that, I would need to know a lot more about numbers, causes, costs, risks, spillover effects and trade-offs, not to mention the need to develop the analytical tools to decipher and weigh different arguments in the debate. What my service-learning experience did was help me to gain some moral orientation, to better understand the immigration debate by apprehending the emotional concerns that create a moral dispute in the first place. I appreciate the moral dispute better because I have a sense of the risk migrants are willing to take in trekking through the desert, I have some understanding of how natives feel when the Phoenix cultural landscape is transforming before their eyes, and I can better imagine what it feels like to be a student in fear of deportation everyday. I bring this appreciation of the problem to the table when my professor discusses ethical standards and policy solutions – and I now apprehend to a fuller extent what rights and violations are in play.

 

My favorite high school teacher used to say that the last thing he wanted was for his students to feel like vessels into which information is poured. He envisioned education as an interactive process, one in which students take responsibility in ways that force increased engagement. Student participation in public service goes well beyond infusing student life with passion and purpose (though that alone is enough to justify it). Service experiences lay the foundation for taking advantage of all a Stanford education has to offer us. They open a window to the problems we must appreciate in order to fairly and fully address them. Service is a crucial part of the academic enterprise and deserves regard and emphasis from professors and students alike.

 

Want to choose action? Send Aysha your comments at [email protected].

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