“Chapter Four: Making Sense” in “Critical Curriculum and Just Community: Making Sense of Service-Learning in Cincinnati”
Chapter Four
Making Sense
I (Hendricks) suspect that my fascination with voice begins with the fact that I am a woman who thinks. More so, given that it is the utterance that fascinates, it probably issues from the importance I attach to being heard. Perhaps it may reside in unmet infantile needs too inaccessible to grasp without depth psychology. The baby cries. Is it heard? The meaning of being heard may lie in the quintessential act of cognition.
—J.J. Hendricks, “Symposium: The Role of the Theorist in Facilitating Voice.”[1]
As I embark on the telling of this story, I find myself inspired by the words of J. J. Hendricks. These words get to the heart of this project. I want the story to be told. Over the years, it has become more my story every day, albeit one that is co-authored and shared with others. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for me and the program is hard to decipher at the moment, but my sense is that it may not matter much over time. I find myself agreeing with Maya Angelou, who writes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.”[2] But the words of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield also resonate: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”[3] These are contradictory perspectives to hold at once, which underscores how anxious I am to offer my version of the story of service-learning in Cincinnati.
What if I am wrong about the story? What if my version is too tinted by my own subjectivity? What if I offend those with and for whom I work? These are all questions that ping around in my writing mind, but perhaps the most important of them is this: What if I don’t tell the story? The answer to that question has silenced those pesky doubts. Perhaps the perspective provided by Saturday Night Live’s late and great Gilda Radner is most befitting to the spirit of this work. In her memoir It’s Always Something, Radner writes, “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”[4] I have come to realize that the story needs to be told and there is no other way forward but to tell it in the midst of living it. What follows is just that.
The story of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati, and my individual agency within it, is very much tied to the story of the larger structure of the university. I have chosen those events that I and the people I consulted believe are the most illustrative of this narrative, punctuating them with key fresh acts that are considered watershed moments for the program, moments that may be understood through the duality of structure and agency outlined in previous chapters.
My goal is that the following narrative adequately captures the dualistic complexity of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati by taking into account both the structural elements as well as those elements illustrated through agency. This narrative will acknowledge the smoothing-over effect that results from the processes of narration and historicization, but it will also account for the histories that unfold alongside the more official or authorized accounts of events happening over time.
The following includes a timeline derived from several sources, including formal and informal conversations, artifact research, story archeology, extensive internet searches, asking many questions, and having many discussions with the co-narrators, the participants in this case study. All of these forms of data have helped to create this narrative. Many events are included, but the most salient are those where the duality of structure and agency is most noticeable.
If another narrator were to tell this story, perhaps they would choose other key watershed events—a strength of the narrative inquiry method. With that said, this is the story as I have lived it, and it is also the story that has been passed on to me by others. The story has several stages, moving from before my birth all the way through today’s ongoing story. In this story of service-learning in Cincinnati, I am one of many farmers who have been instrumental in the sowing and maintaining of programs, but the story is filtered through my point of view and substantiated by the fellow storytellers.
The story of the evolution of the University of Cincinnati’s service-learning program will be punctuated by moments of unfreezing that have not only impacted the program but have formed my own identity within that of the larger, evolving institutional structure. More specifically, the story here is one in which who I am becoming is intimately linked to the becomingness of our service-learning program, and a great deal of detail will be shared from this personal perspective and substantiated by a wide array of narrative chronicled by others.
Key Terms
There are several key terms that I will use repeatedly throughout the narrative, as discussed in chapter two (See Table 4.1 below). It is my hope that understanding the narrative through these terms will illuminate how our service-learning program has evolved over time. In addition to allowing me to make sense of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati, this study adds to the existing structuration theory literature by introducing nuanced modalities to the concept of fresh acts. The reader is urged to journey through the narrative with the following key terms in mind:
DUALITY OF STRUCTURATION | The production, reproduction, and transformation of the institutional structure through rules and resources in relationships |
STRUCTURE | The rules and resources used to sustain the institutional structure |
AGENCY | Behaviors or activities used in the institutional structure |
FRESH ACT | Something new developed in the institutional structure through agency |
Discursive Fresh Act | Something new is articulated by an agent within the structure, which shifts the structure and provides new opportunities for agency |
Structural Fresh Act | The larger structure shifts, which provides agents with new opportunities for agency within the structure |
Intrapersonal Fresh Act | Agents reframe their understandings of the structure through reflection, providing new opportunities for agency |
Interpersonal Fresh Act | New relationships are formed by agents in the structure, shifting the structure and providing new opportunities for agency |
Individuals within an institution—structural agents<EM>use observations, experiences, and social interactions as constructs from which to model social beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.[5] This is significant in that these social constructs often become reified over time, meaning the symbolically created constructs become tangible structural truths. Through agent interaction, social constructions are affirmed, adopted, and fortified through the institution’s system of symbols<EM>the institution’s language.
Structure, Agency, and Language
Over time, institutional structures become taken-for-granted parts of the institutional ideology in that they are subsequently reaffirmed, refortified, and maintained in all symbolic interactions.[6] These cemented reifications are slow to change, remaining as long-standing institutional anchors. Language, though, being the center from which all structural reifications are maintained, can change the reality of a structure.[7] Thus, how we talk about something like the university can have material effects on its stakeholders.
According to Giddens, discursive consciousness is “what actors are able to say, or to give verbal expression to, about social conditions, including especially the conditions of their own action.”[8] Giddens defined practical consciousness, meanwhile, as “what actors know (believe) about social conditions, including especially the conditions of their own actions, but cannot express discursively.”[9] In other words, discursive consciousness refers to those elements of reality that are known and are able to be described, to discursively construct and substantiate. Practical consciousness refers to those elements of a culture’s reality that the culture knows and lives by, but that do not need to be actively maintained through language use. The latter refers to cultural assumptions that go unchallenged as normalized structural truths.
It is important to understand that practical consciousness is influenced by discursive consciousness as institutional agents communicate and interact with one another. Practical consciousness results, in part, from the discursive consciousness, the institutional ideology that is produced and maintained through language. The process of assigning value to meaning is structured by and through the institution’s discursive consciousness. This discursive system is a reservoir of cultural meaning, and, for Giddens, meaning is drawn “from the procedures which agents use in the course of practical action to reach interpretations of what they and others do.”[10] The statement “we shape the rules and they in turn shape us” rings true here, and thus, discursive structures that are actively being created within an institution can be analyzed.
Within the scope of this work, structure is understood to mean the larger organization of the University of Cincinnati while agency refers to the individual and often collective actions taken by individuals or groups of individuals acting within that structure. Agency often confirms and conforms to the existing structure, with individuals reaffirming the existing rules and resources used to sustain the university structure. But there are moments when fresh acts occur, which is agency enacted to shift the institutional structure in some way. It is here where we see the duality of structure and agency in that the structure exists because of individual agency, but it is also altered through the same types of individual agency.
Some more recent scholarship has begun to unravel the social construction of identity within institutional structure in a complex, nuanced, and sophisticated manner. Philip Cassel, for example, cites Giddens in stating that the construction of culture is a dynamic, reflexive, and recursive process.[11] While the social constructionist position claims that agents operate in a web of cultural meaning constructed by interactions with members of the institutional culture, Giddens’s structuration focuses specifically on the process of the ongoing “spinning” of that institutional web. As such, it is believed that individuals (agents) working within an institution (structure) often take an active, although often unconscious, role in spinning the web. Individuals often step into a socially structured lifeworld of their respective institution, the hierarchical meanings of which are passed down through the discursive system of the institution, and they are in some ways locked into roles to play which are always relative to that larger institutional structure. Nonetheless it is in this very space that the idea of agency comes to light.
As institutional discourse is key for social constructionist and symbolic interactionist frameworks, it is equally important to the theoretical framework of structuration because it is through discourse that agency occurs. Being a critical perspective, however, structuration’s focus on individual agency is always understood to be relative to specific, power-laden contexts as structuration occurs over time. For this reason, institutional discourse and individual agency are powerful concepts for structuration as the focus is always on the ongoing, evolving social construction of identity as that identity exists relative to institutional power.[12]
As for agency, while the structuration perspective does hold that individuals can actively shape institutional structures, it is more often the case that the institution shapes the individual.[13] Yet, critically examining the active, reflexive process of constructing institutional structure and identity formation for stakeholders allows for an understanding of the emancipatory power of agents that shape, and are shaped by, that process. In other words, through the lens of structuration, individual agents possess the power to mitigate the institutional structure within which they work. Through the recursive relationship between the individual and the institution (agency-structure duality), the agent has power to shape and re-shape the institutional structure. Therefore, what Giddens terms the discursive production and reproduction of social life will be one of the most important concepts for this book.
While traditional social constructionist perspectives offer a description of how institutional structure develops, structuration’s critical perspective allows room for agents to reshape existing institutional structures. Further, with structuration’s critical reliance on the discursive power to transform (i.e., transformative power), discursive and reflexive leadership may be a way that individual actions can transform the institutional structure in formative ways.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have outlined my role as the storyteller and shared my ambivalence around that role. I have included a list of key terms that will be useful when navigating future chapters. I have also included a more detailed explanation of some terms not carefully considered in earlier chapters of this study.
Questions for Discussion
As discussed also in Chapter 3, listening to campus-community stakeholders is perhaps more important for service-learning than it is for any other work-integrated-learning/experiential-learning program; however, listening is not always pleasant. Sometimes you hear things you would rather not hear. Sometimes people are brutally honest about where the university or college has failed to be a good community partner. On the other hand, you sometimes hear about things your university has done well that are surprising to you. Regardless of the feedback, how you make sense of what you hear is as important as the act of listening. In thinking about your own institution:
- How would you characterize the co-narrators of your university’s story? Who are the co-narrators? Who should be the co-narrators?
- In thinking about the structure of your respective institutional or organizational structure, what story would you narrate or co-narrate?
- When there has been structural shift at your institution, sometimes due to individual agency while other times due to collective agency, were those shifts brought on by fresh acts? If yes, which type of fresh acts? How would you name them or label them?
- What types of fresh acts could you employ to leverage what you are hearing from stakeholders to build or bolster your service-learning program?
Preview of Chapter Five
Chapter five shares the first of six stages in the narrative of service-learning in Cincinnati. In this chapter, “Stage One: The Ground Thaws,” readers will be introduced to one of the original farmers of service-learning, Herman Schneider. The following chapter also includes a timeline of events in the evolution of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati from 1925–1998.
- J.J. Hendricks and Margaret H. Vickers, “Symposium: The Role of the Theorist in Facilitating Voice,” Administrative Theory & Praxis 25, no. 4 (2003): 457. ↵
- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (New York: Random House, 1969). ↵
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), page 5 ↵
- Gilda Radner, It’s Always Something, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 268. ↵
- Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1966). ↵
- Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction; Herbert Blumer, “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection,” The Sociological Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1969): 275–291; Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). ↵
- Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (London: Routledge, 1987). ↵
- Giddens, Constitution, 374. ↵
- Giddens, Constitution, 374. ↵
- Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 59. ↵
- Philip Cassell, The Giddens Reader, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). ↵
- Giddens, Constitution. ↵
- Giddens, Constitution. ↵
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