“Chapter One: Becoming” in “Critical Curriculum and Just Community: Making Sense of Service-Learning in Cincinnati”
Chapter One
Becoming
Ideas of the university in the public domain are … too often without hope, taking the form of either a hand-wringing over the current state of the university or merely offering a defense of the emerging nature of “the entrepreneurial university.” Against this background, the questions arise as to what, if any, are the prospects for imaging the university anew? What role might the imagination play here? What are its limits and what might be its potential for bringing forward new forms of the university? This then is the problem before us: the problem of the place of imagination in developing the idea—and the institutional form—of the university.
—Ronald Barnett, Imagining the University[1]
Those of us who work in higher education have been asking ourselves and each other for some time now whether the university is a means to prepare students for the marketplace or a means to make the world a better place. One pathway leans toward the capitalistic culture of the West and the other toward social justice and equity. My fear is that much of higher education is focused on the former, geared toward creating cogs for the capitalistic machinery of the consumption culture. But we, as educators, can do better, which means empowering our students to do better, which means that our communities will be better. Perhaps one way we can do so is by understanding the ongoing structuration of higher education, including how its stakeholders from the university and the community are or are not empowered as agents within it. For example, our websites often proclaim, emphatically, that we are bettering those communities who host our universities, while our day-to-day responsibilities often constrain work that would better those communities. In order to escape these restraints, we must have the liberty to imagine alternative methods for the university and community to collaborate in mutually reinforcing ways.
For close to twenty years, my professional and personal life have focused on the synergy created when the university and the community authentically engage with one another. As you will see throughout this book, how those with access to resources and power can be made more whole by engaging with those with less access to resources and power is of particular importance to my aim as an educator. Much of what I do professionally and personally is filtered through those lenses, and thus, my relationship with the world is biased through the standpoint of campus-community connections.
The manner of campus-community engagement that has been most formative for me during these many years, and the one that I am most familiar with, is service-learning. In a forthcoming chapter of this book, I go into detail about the varying definitions of service-learning, but, initially, service-learning can be understood as a method of teaching and learning wherein students, faculty, and community reciprocally participate in educational partnerships that benefit both the campus and the community. At the University of Cincinnati, we define service-learning in the following way: “A specially designed educational experience in which students combine reflection with structured participation in community-based projects to achieve specified learning outcomes as part of an academic course and/or program requirement. By participating in service-learning partnerships at the local, national, and/or international level, students gain a richer mastery of course content, enhance their sense of civic responsibility, and ultimately develop a more integrated approach to understanding the relationship between theory, practice, ideas, values, and community.”[2] It is my hope that this book will strengthen the existing pool of research on service-learning programs, both off- and on-campus, including how leaders may foster collaborative experiences and broadened subjectivities for all stakeholders.
The narrative detailed in the forthcoming pages tell the story of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati, including how key watershed moments and fresh acts have helped to evolve the program from Herman Schneider’s 1901 vision of cooperative learning into what it is today. The birthplace of coop education, the University of Cincinnati has created a mission to make cooperative learning opportunities as universally inclusive as possible, which has led to the development and expansion of the service-learning program observable today. While this study focuses on the University of Cincinnati’s service-learning program, what may be learned here will be transferable to other universities, community colleges, and organizations. My findings are best suited to other service-learning programs, but much of what I’ve found is applicable to other types of campus-community partnerships and experiential learning programs. In sum, my hope is that this book will contribute to experiential education in higher education and most importantly, to our deepening understanding of the significance of campus-community connections.
I am pleased to offer this book itself as a potential site of campus-community engagement. What started as a single manuscript has morphed into an interactive open access book with companion resources including testimonials, essays, and a tool kit of documents and templates that we are happy to share. Our desire to capture the voices and resources of the over two hundred faculty and staff, four thousand students, and several hundred community partners is made possible through the University of Cincinnati Press’s open access platform, Manifold. Manifold offers exciting opportunities for readers to interact with the book, with me, and with one another. I look forward to participating in an ongoing community conversation about service-learning as this book grows and expands with reader contributions.
Working the Hyphens of the “Privilege-Poverty” Dichotomy
Much of what follows highlights the seeming dichotomy that exists between those “with” access to resources and those “without” access. It should be noted, however, that the seeming dichotomy between privilege and poverty is complicated. In fact, those people and communities who are portrayed as lacking material resources are often rich in other more important ways. Conversely, those peoples and communities who are often seen as being rich in material resources are often poor in other ways. Understanding and respecting this complexity is what drives successful service-learning; when this complexity is oversimplified and forced into a one-sided relational flow of interaction, service-learning can often do more harm than good. Service-learning itself is a good example of the complexity represented by the hyphen that separates the two terms in that service and learning are dancing in an ongoing, reciprocal process; neither is dominant over the other.
Peter Block and John McKnight, both longstanding community activists, discuss the difficulty of honoring this complex relationship in their book, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, including how we often fail to make the most of it in a meaningful, long-lasting, and sustainable way. “Systems that are constructed for order,” they write, “cannot provide satisfaction in domains that require a unique and personal human solution.”[3] In other words, Block and McKnight discuss how communities, and people within those communities, often exist in isolation from one another, and potential synergy between those communities is often ignored due to the larger structural system in which most community and programmatic structures are forced to operate.
This book, and the research that precedes it, demonstrates the perspective of what Michelle Fine called, in her discussion of self and other in qualitative research, “working the hyphens.” “Self and Other are knottily entangled,” writes Fine, explaining that when researchers “opt … to engage in social struggles with those who have been exploited and subjugated, we work the hyphen, revealing far more about ourselves, and far more about the structures of Othering.”[4] By working the hyphens in my own research and in my teaching, I aim to create partnership between the university and its surrounding community.
Toward this end, I have written that members of the dominant culture must first discursively acknowledge the role they play in perpetuating social injustices.[5] I fully understand that before researchers, writers, teachers, and learners can deconstruct social injustices, they must acknowledge to what degree they feed them. People typically have difficulty doing this because it is challenging and often unpleasant, and it makes them uncomfortable. It has been my experience, in fact, that many people seem to be unwilling or unable to acknowledge their own oppressive tendencies, including the consequences of those tendencies, which makes me very aware of the difficulty that privileged individuals face when trying to become self-critically conscious. But as human communication and discourse structures identity and reality, both individually and collectively, becoming self-critically conscious is necessary for change.[6] Without feeling the difficulty created when one is forced to identify with the plights and indignities of others, little will change. We need to engage in those moments of uncomfortable reflection, understanding that cultural identity is always a work in process.
With that in mind, I should address my own cultural identity. I am a middle-class, educated, heterosexual man from a relatively privileged sector of society. In this culture, these dimensions of identity wield a certain amount of power, and more importantly, they provide comfortable isolation from marginalized groups of people. This is a concern for effective understanding of others because it causes me to question whether I can truly climb out of my privileged cultural silo and identify with the oppressed and repressed. More specific to my practice, this is a concern in my classroom where I identify as a professor, in the academy where I identify as a scholar, and in the field where I identify as a leader. Each of these identities yields cultural privilege which cannot be ignored. It would be arrogant to claim that I can truly understand the injustices of others, but I can, at the very least acknowledge how my privilege may unintentionally contribute to the marginalization of others.
When done well, service-learning can actively dissolve the barriers that exist between both people and communities just as it does those that exist between the community and the university. The key to success, which will be covered in detail throughout this work, is in understanding the nuanced ways in which people, regardless of socioeconomic status and/or hierarchical roles within universities and institutions, all have assets and deficits which, when shared within the flow of authentic partnership, can reinforce one another in a reciprocal and holistic way. It is imperative that we focus on the potential synergy of telling, sharing, and co-living (i.e., making sense of) diverse lived experiences.[7]
Finding Agency within Existing Structures
The study of privilege and structural power has often been presented as a system of domination without agents, thereby obfuscating the historical process of structural domination and instead simply describing the state of structural dominance.[8] In this book, however, by emphasizing the duality of agency within institutional structure—in that the structure exists because of individual agency but is also altered through this same individual agency—I have tried to move from merely describing programmatic evolutions to prescribing different courses of action—means of agency—relative to them. What I found through this writing is applicable to other stakeholders and programs: change can be accomplished through collectively experiencing and collectively telling the story. The key is to collaboratively make sense of, thereby restructuring, the institutional reality so that it can better benefit many types of stakeholders.[9]
Deconstructing Isolation through Service-Learning
We individually have incomplete pictures of reality; we can each offer unique perspectives, but these are inescapably limited by our inability to be omniscient. Our points of view, then, are particularly grounded by individual experience and, at best, simply incomplete; at worst, they are fundamentally unjust. This is the precise way we need one another—to fill in the gaps.
I believe that our discourse, which contains and constrains our reality, is also one of the only means we have at our disposal through which to share our limited points of view. This understanding is what fuels my pedagogy and my leadership, and thus underscores my educational philosophy and professional practice. To understand and impact this world, one must be able to experience it from multiple subjectivities. It therefore follows that to teach people in this world, one must be able to teach from multiple subjectivities and remain open to others as they express and develop their own respective subjectivities.
Collectively making sense and collaboratively re-structuring cultural reality is possible, but not easy. In fact, doing so makes people uncomfortable, especially when stakeholders are operating from differently privileged perspectives. We must learn to walk in others’ shoes, nevertheless, seeing the world from their standpoints and vantage points, and we must do so as thinkers, teachers, and social researchers who remain steadfastly focused on the unfair power imbalances and unequal access to resources found in our culture today.
I believe that deconstructing the privilege–poverty dichotomy through language, education, experience, and engagement is one way to proactively structure a more equitable and socially just world. People need to become uncomfortable if positive change is going to occur. As educators and as leaders in higher education, we may be able to situate students, colleagues, and peers into some of those uncomfortable settings, perhaps causing a broadening of their subjectivities through their own moments of what John Dewey referred to as felt difficulty—opportunities for being uncomfortable enough that it requires them to learn something new or apply old learning in new ways.[10] In “Exploring Race: Teacher Educators Bridge Their Personal and Professional Identities,” Michele Genor and Ann Schulte remind us that as educators, we must “engage in collaborative inquiry [with our students]. Placing teachers at the center of their learning assists [students] in examining themselves in relation to other social systems.”[11] This is the impetus for service-learning programs in fostering meaningful and reciprocal campus-community connections.
The process for educators committed to helping students arrive at the self-awareness necessary to evoke change is as follows. First, we help students find learning experiences that they normally would not encounter, perhaps creating opportunities in which they might feel uncomfortable enough to need the theories and skills being taught in the class in order to respond to their own moments of felt difficulty. Second, we want them to discuss what they learn and ask them to reflect on why they feel uncomfortable in those situations. Third, we want them to be able to articulate what role they could play in alleviating those uncomfortable moments, which should include their understandings of social justice and collective responsibility, and how they are motivated to become present and future active agents of change within their own communities. In this way, service-learning can work toward restructuring a more just and inclusive community.
Structure and Agency as Told in This Story
This book is a multifaceted and collectively told story about the evolution of the University of Cincinnati’s Service-Learning Program (SL@UC). This story will be punctuated by moments of unfreezing that have not only had an impact on the program but have formed my own identity within that of the larger, evolving institutional structure of the University of Cincinnati and of the academy. More specifically, the story here is one in which my journey as a leader and practitioner is intimately linked to the becomingness of the service-learning program at UC, and a great deal of detail will be shared from this personal perspective and substantiated by a wide array of narratives chronicled by others.
Structuration theory, the undergirding of this work, intentionally utilizes, and in fact requires, both sides of the dichotomy in that the institutional structure of an organization—like a university—contains and constrains individual agency of its members. Conversely, the institutional structure can only change via individual agency of its members.[12] Therefore, to understand an organizational structure of a university holistically, one must uncover and understand both the deterministic elements of an organization—the rules that govern behavior and choice—and the socially constructed agency that sometimes alter the deterministic structure but most times simply reinforce it. Structuration theory, further discussed in chapter two, will be one important lens throughout this narrative.
Within the scope of this narrative, structure is understood as the larger organization of the University of Cincinnati (or any university), while agency refers to the individual and often collective actions taken by individuals or groups of individuals, such as educators, students, and community members. Agency often confirms the existing structure and conforms to it, with individuals reaffirming the existing rules and resources used to sustain the university structure, but there are moments when fresh acts occur, when agency is 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 that same individual agency.
Much literature views humans as culture-ING beings. As such, we understand that human beings can construct new and different meanings, understandings, and practices amid ongoing experience.[13] Rhunette Diggs, for example, advanced the “Evolving-Developmental-Interactional perspective” that captured this becoming notion in the following way:
Who I am, as I claim it or speak it, is a combination of biology and construction of my past and becomes the central or pivotal framework for my interaction in living or the person I am becoming. These selves or identities are inexorably intertwined; the one, who I am, is stable and has been determined by biology and history, which I embrace as a necessity for survival of my well-being. The other, who I am becoming, is affected subtly and directly. As I evolve, interactions become chronicled as recognitions that fuel reflection that will help to construct the becoming “self.”[14]
My higher education role has developed within an evolving institutional structure. My contributions to the literature, and particularly the contributions toward a deeper understanding of individual agency within institutional structure, have been instrumental in expanding the impact, scope, and outcomes of my faculty contributions to my academic unit, to the university, to the field, and to the community.
Brief Description of What’s to Come
The story of the service-learning program at the University of Cincinnati (also framed often as my story), can be compared to farming. Like farming, service-learning requires careful planning, time, and tending in order to yield a successful outcome. In fact, much of farming requires innovative approaches to overcoming obstacles, leveraging existing resources, and securing new resources to maintain a sustained growth. To begin, I will share narratives related to how making sense of service-learning in Cincinnati has evolved under my practical application of urban educational leadership including an important and painful moment of unfreezing and structuration. Finally, I will outline several key next steps that are guiding the latest evolutions of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati, including shifts in institutional structure and my agency within it.
Like a farm, when tended over time, service-learning can also evolve into something more. A program designed to prepare students for the work force can develop into an opportunity for students to become self-critically conscious citizens who effect positive change by working in partnership with community stakeholders.
Conclusion
This book highlights key watershed moments in the evolution of the service-learning program at the University of Cincinnati, which spans 1921 to the present. These watershed moments may be familiar to larger and older programs, while emerging programs might use these watershed moments to lay out a strategy for their own direction and growth. One of the overarching goals of this book is to better understand and share the history and context of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati, a story that will be told from multiple perspectives, with voices emerging from both the campus and the community. I encourage program leaders to invite multiple voices at their own universities to read and respond.
Another overarching goal is to share with you, the reader, the ongoing evolutions and improvements to service-learning at the University of Cincinnati moving forward and into the future; lessons learned along the way may be valuable to other service-learning scholars, practitioners, and institutional leaders. In short, this work intends to make sense of service-learning in Cincinnati, both retrospectively and looking forward, so that others can learn from our experiences—my own experiences and those of others have helped me to make sense of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati—and this book will share the lessons learned throughout that sensemaking.
It is my hope that this book will strengthen the existing pool of research of the social structuration of service-learning programs, both off- and on-campus, including how leaders may foster collaborative experiences and broadened subjectivities for all stakeholders.
Questions for Discussion
The organizational structure of service-learning at the University of Cincinnati has evolved over time, in repeated cycles of freezing and unfreezing. The cycles often mirror the ongoing evolution of the host institution as new university presidents begin their administrations, new provosts are hired, academic master plans are revisited and refocused, and the needs of the surrounding communities shift and change. In thinking about your own institution:
- How would you describe the ongoing structural evolution of your curricular campus-community engagement programs?
- How have the needs of the surrounding community evolved over the last five years? How has the global pandemic impacted those needs?
- Have there been moments of freezing and unfreezing? How would you describe them to someone that is not in higher education? How would you describe them to someone who is in higher education, perhaps to a person at another institution?
A Preview of Chapter Two
In chapter two, the reader will be introduced to the history of service-learning in higher education and the power of reflective discourse and action-oriented narrative inquiry. This chapter will also discuss the complex dichotomy inherent in leading a sixteen-year-old program through the intersecting lenses of servant leadership, collective impact, and structuration theory.
- Ronald Barnett, Imagining the University, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. ↵
- “Make a Difference,” Career Education, University of Cincinnati, https://www.uc.edu/campus-life/careereducation/get-experience/service-learning.html ↵
- Peter Block and John McKnight, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, (San Francisco: Barnett-Kohler, 2010), p. 37. ↵
- Michelle Fine, “Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 72. ↵
- Michael Sharp, “Sensemaking in Cincinnati: Sharing Stories of Racial Discord,” (master’s thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2005). ↵
- See Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). ↵
- This perspective draws heavily from Anthony Giddens’s structurational perspective as described in The Constitution of Society, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984) and Linda Putnam and Cynthia Stohl’s “Bona Fide Groups: An Alternative Perspective for Communication and Small Group Decision Making,” in Communication and Group Decision Making, eds. Randy Hiwokawa and Marshall Scott Poole (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.: 1996): 148-178. ↵
- Pierre Bourdieu’s work, Outline of a Theory of Practice, vol. 16, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), asks where a system comes from, how it is produced and reproduced, and how it can be changed. “Action” describes what people in the system do and is not necessarily tied to intention. Rather, action is, for Bourdieu, based on the “logic of practice.” Almost thirty years later, Zeus Leonardo further develops this thinking toward actual choice—better understood in the language of this book as agency—and the work required to maintain status quo inside structural systems in “Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge: The Functions of Criticism in Quality Education.” Educational Researcher 33, no. 6 (2004): 11–18. Leonardo maintains that the theme of privilege obscures the subject of domination—the agent of actions—because a given situation is described as happening almost without the knowledge of those who are privileged and powerful. This theory conjures up images of domination happening without the agency of the privileged, rather than through their action and at the expense of the underprivileged. ↵
- Sharp, M. J. (2005). Sensemaking in Cincinnati: Sharing stories of racial discord (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati). ↵
- John Dewey, How We Think (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997). ↵
- Michele Genor and Ann Schulte, “Exploring Race: Teacher Educators Bridge Their Personal and Professional Identities,” Multicultural Perspectives, 4, no. 3 (2002): 15-20. ↵
- Giddens, Constitution. ↵
- Steven R. Barley and Pamela S. Tolbert, “Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links Between Action and Institution,” Organization Studies18, no. 1 (1997): 93–117. ↵
- Rhunette Diggs, “African American Faculty on a White Campus: Considering Self-Identification, Recognitions, and Reflections,” (presentation at the Speech Communication Association, San Diego, CA, 1996). ↵
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.