Book Review: Where's the Wisdom in Service-Learning? by Robert Shumer

Abstract

Nearly 40 years ago my colleague Bob Sigmon, a long-time leading advocate of service-learning, shared with me a quote from Robert Theobald: "Healthy people are growing and helping other people to grow." In this volume, Robert Shumer features a variety of colleagues who provide an amazing collage to bring this quote to life. Each author illustrates in unique ways their own intuitive and grounded wisdom illustrating what it means to "grow and to help others to grow." Each story helps to illustrate the foundations on which each expert built their service-learning practice and the legacy that each has left in the field. This book highlights the ways that these authors transformed their chance "happenstances" into "happenings" and wisdom (p. 171). With it, Shumer has provided a rich complement to the earlier and ongoing work by Tim Stanton, Dwight Giles, and Nadine Cruz in their book Service-Learning: A Movement's Pioneers Reflect on Its Origins, Practice, and Future (1999) as well as the original work that grew out of the Wingspread gathering in 1997. In this volume, Giles and Stanton pose compelling questions and offer an overview in their foreword. They point out that the book addresses three wisdom domains: a reflection on the past history and origins, subsequent development of the field, and its future possibilities. They further identify the ongoing tension between the academy and the community and the complex realities associated with experiential education and communitybased learning overall. The authors also highlight the principles of good practice (collaboration, reciprocity, and diversity) that Suzanne Mintz and I posited (Jacoby & Associates, 1996) by stressing the centrality of seeing the community as the place where much, if not most, of the wisdom will be found. As a long-time reviewer of manuscripts, I have been frustrated by the consistent lack of knowledge about foundational scholarship in our field. This book addresses this issue. The history and overview chapters in this book are worth the price of the book. And the remaining chapters and stories are grounded in the lives and "happenings" of our colleagues who have shared their stories. I know of no chapter or book that is as thorough or as richly documented with a comprehensive bibliography. In the first chapter, Shumer, Stanton, and Giles capture the history and the evolution of the service-learning field in scope and specificity that we all should ponder. They focus on three concepts that underlie service-learning: the common good, civil society, and learning by doing. This well-documented chapter also underscores the nuances and complexity underlying the term service-learning and gives the reader a rich sense of the reasons that people came to the service-learning movement: service and charity, social justice, and democratic education. This

Evaluating the Health of Community/University Partnerships: Experiential Learning Practice with an Aim Toward the Public Good

“…The benefits to students are well understood to include better retention rates, stronger critical thinking skills, enhanced personal development, and higher levels of engagement and satisfaction (Astin et al, 2000;Eyler & Giles, 1999;Kearney, 2013). While much is known about the benefits and outcomes of community-based learning for students, a critique highlighting the dearth in community partner perspective has also been revealed (Cruz & Giles, 2000). As a result of this critique, more research now includes the perspective of community partners who host students in community-based learning positions, but there is still more to explore.…”

From “Figure-ground” to “Figure-in-ground”: Relevance and Outcomes of Critical Service-learning for the Design Field_ the Detroit Case Study

“…Within this new critical approach, the initial framing of service-learning as "reciprocal learning" is dismantled, and the issue of power imbalance is acknowledge and addressed. More subtle and nimble approaches to the interactions between students and community members are proposed, with the acknowledgement that definitions, methodologies and complexities of service-learning impacts on communities further need to be identified and understood (Cruz and Giles 2000). Green (2001) calls attention to the importance of questioning levels of expertise of facilitators and community members and of acknowledging the variety of types of expertise possessed within and across groups.…”

Engaging Emotions in Teacher Education Research

“…Service learning now spans continents and countries and many kinds of institutions-from grade school through higher education and beyond. Such programs are often criticized for enabling those who are socially and economically privileged to learn from and not with persons less fortunate than themselves; more recently, organizations sponsoring such partnerships have been increasing attention to democratic collaborations between those serving and those served (Butin, 2006;Cruz & Giles, 2000;Jacoby, 2009). here, we highlight partnerships with organizations aimed at developing reciprocal, compassionate relationships between campus groups and the communities in which these groups locate their service.…”