Full Description
Randy Stoecker has been "practicing" forms of community-engaged scholarship, including service learning, for thirty years now, and he readily admits, "Practice does not make perfect." In his highly personal critique, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, the author worries about the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes as well as the risks and rewards of this work.
Here, Stoecker questions the prioritization and theoretical/philosophical underpinnings of the core concepts of service learning: 1. learning, 2. service, 3. community, and 4. change. By "liberating" service learning, he suggests reversing the prioritization of the concepts, starting with change, then community, then service, and then learning. In doing so, he clarifies the benefits and purpose of this work, arguing that it will create greater pedagogical and community impact.
Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement challenges-and hopefully will change-our thinking about higher education community engagement.
Contents
Prelude: Confessions and Acknowledgments
I The Problem and Its Context
1 Why I Worry
2 A Brief Counterintuitive History of Service Learning
3 Theories (Conscious and Unconscious) of Institutionalized Service Learning
Interlude
II Institutionalized Service Learning
4 What Is Institutionalized Service Learning's Theory of Learning?
5 What Is Institutionalized Service Learning's Theory of Service?
6 What Is Institutionalized Service Learning's Theory of Community?
7 What Is Institutionalized Service Learning's Theory of Change?
III Liberating Service Learning
8 Toward a Liberating Theory of Change
9 Toward a Liberating Theory of Community
10 Toward a Liberating Theory of Service
11 Toward a Liberating Theory of Learning
12 Toward a Liberated World?
Postlude
References
Index
