(DOWNLOAD) "Service-Learning is ... How Faculty Explain Their Practice (Report)" by Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Service-Learning is ... How Faculty Explain Their Practice (Report)
- Author : Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 269 KB
Description
These five quotes, offered by five different nominees for the Campus Compact Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service-Learning, present a set of assumptions regarding the purposes of service-learning and its connection to the faculty member involved in it. As an explanation of his/her work, each discourse is embedded in a specific social context and a set of values, beliefs, and social practices. While one faculty member's discourse identified his service-learning as deriving from his own family history and role models growing up, another represented her service-learning as the natural extension of disciplinary goals--the desire to teach a specific subject well. A third faculty member explained her work as an experiential educator committed to providing theory to practice opportunities, while a fourth discussed the power of service-learning to enhance political self-efficacy. Finally, a fifth nominee explained how service-learning is a natural outgrowth of working and living in an institutional culture that values and promotes this kind of work. In every case, these faculty members explained their work in ways that suggest different sets of problems that service-learning helps them solve and different ways in which they are themselves positioned within the service, with different implications for practice. Many researchers have explored faculty engagement in service-learning. However, scholarship rarely considers the ways in which the discourses used by faculty to describe service-learning--that is, the stories they tell about what it is they are doing and why--construct images of subject positions, problems, and solutions that inform our beliefs about and practice of service-learning. Identifying dominant discourses used by faculty to describe service-learning can provide another lens on how to support faculty in this work, as well as what beliefs may be working against its acceptance in different academic cultures. It may also help service-learning advocates to consider the strengths and limitations of using different dominant discourses in any particular college or university environment or national policy-making arena (Allan, Gordon, & Iverson, 2006). The purpose of this study was to understand the dominant discourses used by faculty to explain service-learning and the dominant images of participants, problems, and solutions these discourses present.