Ways of Engagement

I guess I’ll start by saying why I actually wrote this prompt. As I said in class, I came to service-learning in a slightly unusual way: I never had a course on experiential education; I never did service-learning; I never even participated in a co-op or internship. Instead, when I was in Chris’ class my first semester of grad school, we read a piece by Paula Mathieu and Diana George about homelessness and public advocacy. Right here in Boston, people were paying money to see homeless people hurt each other. Videos were being sold of these “bum fights” and money was being made because some people were desperate enough to endure physical pain to earn money. I remember reading the article and thinking how crazy it was that I had never thought of using composition as engaging with the public (the community both within and outside of the university) in order to change things, make things known, draw attention to important issues. I liked the article because it shocked me. It scared me that people did this but it inspired (yeah, I’ll go with that word though it sounds cheesy) to research something that I never thought much about before: using writing to do something.

Now, before I go off on how much I love service-learning (which I agree with Chris is a very problematic term), I do have to say that I still see immense value in courses that are not experiential in this way. Indeed, theorizing and learning inside the context of the classroom is something I enjoy and value; otherwise, why am I in grad school? In any case, I did my first S-L project on what it would mean for S-L to be a feminist pedagogy. My main reason for thinking about S-L with a feminist lens is so that it could account for the flexibility and reflexivity (not just being reflective, but constantly “bending back on” and re-seeing, revisiting, your ideas and actions and how they affect others) that I think good teaching depends on. Not many people will say that they consciously use a “feminist pedagogy,” but my goal with this project was to figure out ways in which feminist principles could make service-learning less of a “we are trying to save the community” project. Instead, it should be reciprocal! We can learn from the community, and they can learn from us! And, to top that off, why do we even separate ourselves from the community? As Chris pointed out, universities are often blocked off from interacting with the surroundings and it creates a tension and even a hierarchy when we talk about the “university” as being higher than or better than the “community”. That is not true, and the point of feminist scholarship is to deconstruct or destabilize hierarchies such as these.

The next project I did on S-L became the essay which you will all read in a couple weeks. It’s a working-through of my ideas about translingualism (quite literally “going between” languages) within a classroom. Here, I’ve taken up a new approach and decided to move into the “community engagement” definition that I think is more realistic and appropriate to what I am envisioning. ENGAGEMENT is huge in my mind. When I think about the word “engage,” that’s what I want to do: I want to be a part of something; do something; make something happen. It’s active. In my mind, it’s also something that involves multiple people and multiple languages. You engage in discussion—not a one sided conversation. To engage in the community, then, is to be a part of it—and the many languages it involves.

So, in many ways, I’m a beginner like some of you may be. This is my first experiential education course. I know that my research and the texts I’ve read and written have not completely prepared me for the things that will happen. But I’m ready to figure that out.