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Disciplinary Pathways to Service Learning
Service-Learning
in the Humanities
Robin Fujikawa
Assistant Professor in Philosophy
Kapi'olani Community College
Honolulu, Hawai'i
In a happy coincidence and through a series of
workshops presented at Kapi'olani Community College, I was introduced to
one of the most effective volunteer agencies through which students in
my class served. Called project Dana, it serves the Honolulu area providing
home care services to the elderly and home bound, many of whom are of Asian
ancestry. For my Asian philosophy students, the service-learning experiences
derived through Project Dana have provided rich material for philosophical
questions, cross-cultural investigations, reflection papers, and teacher-student
discussions. I have found the hours of reflective and speculative discussions
with these students to be among the most rewarding of my career. Incidentally,
one student subsequently found employment and a new direction to her career
partly because of her service-learning experiences with that project. The
happy coincidences found in the arrangement with project Dana notwithstanding,
that arrangement may serve as a general example of how community agencies
and classroom curricula can enhance each other. It certainly demonstrated
to me how effective academic discussions can be and how closely teacher
and student can share common concerns when the questions arise out of ongoing
field study work.
Project Dana was but one of many agencies that were introduced to me
by workshops, institutes, service-learning program coordinators, pamphlets,
and people from referral agencies over the course of the last two years.
I was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of resources that are currently
available in the field. While due credit must go to the conscientious dedication
of the people who have developed these resources, I am encouraged to think
that with a little investigation similar pleasant surprises may be discovered
in any community.
The coincidence of Project Dana and my activities while teaching philosophy
in the Humanities Department was especially striking because the term dana,
or selfless giving, is a notion that developed in Indian Buddhism which
was part of a general way of thinking that influences my teaching methodology
and goals. The notion of dana in particular has since afforded my
service-learning projects considerable meaning and grist for speculative
discussion. Dana is not so much a theoretical abstraction or static
thing; it is a virtue. As a virtue, dana, is an achievement of character
and awareness that results from how one conducts oneself in the world.
That conduct mirrors one's level of personal achievement. Selfless giving
is thus not an act of condescension or self-mortification; it is a means
by which one expresses and works out one's awareness. It is and honor to
be able to serve selflessly at a temple or give selflessly to a beggar.
This notion of service is not a badge; it is the paradigm of all genuine
acts and is inherent in the most elevated of careers. The performance of
dana is at once the means by which one attains genuineness of actions
and the expression of that attainment. Service in Buddhist cultures carries
such connotations of honor and highest achievement. While the term may
carry obviously religious overtones, the notion pervades secular society
as well. The Japanese word for "husband," danna, or danna-sama,
originates from this term. The term may also function effectively in service-learning
discourse as well, for its ideals have helped veer our service-learning
activities in my classes from patronization, condescension, and a sense
of futility.
In more general terms, service-learning activities have revitalized
my conception of what I do as a teacher in the humanities. Service-learning
speaks the same language as my career as teacher and it offers alternative
methodological options, vocabulary modes, and solutions to some types of
curricular problems. Let me indicate in what follows how challenges that
have arisen out of Asian cultural perspectives to my educational philosophy
as a teacher in the humanities department have been met by service-learning.
I hope my story affords some insight into how intimately service-learning
can work with instructional goal and how the difficulties in talking about
service-learning may stem from a more general problem of a need for a new
vocabulary in education.
When the word for "human being" used in the Chinese and Japanese
languages was first written a curious choice of ideograms was made to form
it. The first ideogram depicts a person and the other depicts "interval"
or "space." At first glance it might appear that the second of
the two were superfluous or misdirected, for the first ideogram alone or
even repeated would seem to sufficiently and accurately define the class
of human beings by its membership. It is significant that the hallmark
of being human was found not in individual persons but in their intervals,
the space that surrounds each individual. That is, the hallmark of being
human was found to be in the larger picture of the individual's external
relations. In this conception of what it is to be human, the insight is
repeated in Chinese cultures: when seeking our humanity, we find it or
rather achieve it in our relatedness to others.
Similarly, schools today may find occasion to turn to the larger of
two pictures when conceptualizing the locus and aims of education. If one
picture is that of the individual (student, group, or thing), let the larger
picture be the individual's external relationship that surround the other
picture. Note that the membership of these two pictures differ. The first
picture is populated by individuals who possess relations, the second by
spaces (relations) that individuate individuals. Because of their difference
in membership, languages appropriate to each differ. To the first picture
belongs the language of individual "things" (persons, groups
of persons, grades, objects, behaviors, items of knowledge and their attributes),
and to the other belongs a language of relations (social, spatial, and
temporal). The language of individual things may satisfactorily and accurately
explain the locus and aims of education, but there are occasions when the
other language may do so as well. Each language, moreover, expresses itself
with different starting assumptions about what it is that populates its
world. Normally, one would be inclined to say that the language of individual
things is both sufficient to explain everything, including the relations
that things have, and thereby obviates the need to consider the possibility
and utility of a distinctly different language of relations. However, there
may be conceptual and expressive limitations in any language that are released
in a shift to another. It may be worth the effort to look to a language
of relations for such conceptual and expressive possibilities in education.
A dilemma in service-learning frequently arises when a student asks,
"What's in it for me?" While I want to respond by saying "Absolutely
nothing," in order to preserve the voluntary and genuine service qualities
of the program, this curt answer neither promotes the program nor answers
the question; this retort also risks misrepresentation of the program and
condescension toward the student. On the other hand, responding in terms
of extra credits, replacement of specific requirements, adaptation to personal
learning styles, more personal attention by the teacher, or other benefits
fails to convey the reason and spirit of the program and jeopardizes its
chances of meaningful success. This dilemma cannot by circumvented by making
the service mandatory, for that also risks turning service-learning into
yet another type of paid job.
Here is where a shift in languages may help. The above dilemma arises
because both question and answers are locked into the language of things.
Answered in this way, the question "What's in it for me?" can
never be satisfactory. Shifting to a language of relations may be part
of a solution. For example, the student may find the following question
to be a suitable equivalent: "What changes in my learning experience
might result from participating in this program?" Because this question
is phrased in terms of relations, process, time, and experience, the possibility
of a mutually satisfactory answer opens. The teacher can then talk about
service-learning in such terms as turn-about experiences that others have
had, possible inadequacies of didactic instruction, and shifts in relationships
to the discipline that become possible.
Schools may choose to make the statement that the locus of education
is not the student exclusively, that the humanistic aims of education are
not fulfilled in individual students or in their aggregation. Instead,
the student's relatedness to the rest of humanity can be affirmed to be
a necessary part of the language of education. Teacher and student alike
may conceptualize their common enterprise in terms that point toward the
student exclusively, but the turning of the student's regard and actions
outwardly in external relations is arguably an intrinsic function of education.
Given that the outside world is universally talked about, if it is talked
about as information that the student is to acquire or if it is discussed
for the purpose of developing a student's skill, such discussion makes
the assumption that we are preparing the student for his or her encounter
with the real world that takes place outside of class or after the student
graduates. The assumption being made here is that education educates the
student, but this is inwardly directed (or individual-oriented) education
may inadvertently proceed at the expense of a relation-oriented education
that does not separate itself from the world that is either external or
subsequent to itself.
As in the Chinese characters for human being, we may claim that the
picture comprised of individual persons is unable to express certain things,
and we must conduct our enterprise in terms of the spaces that are found
in their intervals, that is, in external relations. The notion of the totality
of external relations can replace the individual as locus of education
and is likely to be abstracted and formulated in terms of the language
of things, so I borrow from the Asian tradition, this time from Buddhism
and its notion of dharma. Dharma, or thing as experienced
moment, may be construed in the present discussion as lived world of experience.
In this sense, we may say that what a teacher cultivates is not exclusively
what a student has within (aptitudes, attitudes, and achievements under
one's belt), but is the lived world of experience that the student achieves
in his or her external relations. A student's world of experience may be
narrow or expansive, contentious or cooperative, vicious or just, vain
or filled with possibility, and whether it is one or the other is not merely
a matter of attitude, decision, or heredity. These are personal matters
into which education cannot intrude but from which education cannot divorce
itself. If a student's lived world of experience is a negotiated achievement
and not a given, then education ought to be of some help to the student
in that negotiation. It might be further claimed that genuine learning
takes place precisely in that negotiation and has a vested interest in
its outcome. Similarly, the humanity to which education dedicates itself
to cultivating is not a condition at birth; it is an achievement upon which
depends the entire educational enterprise. The locus of this achievement
of humanity is the individual's lived world of experience, and this locus
lies squarely within the purview of education. To the extent that this
is true, service-learning addresses an essential need in education today.
Using a language of relations, the process and aims of education may
be described in the following terms. Education cultivates the process by
which the individual relates to and engages reality, and as such it deals
primarily with relations that then determine how both individual and reality
change in that individual's lived world of experience. The nature of neither
individual student nor reality is a fixed and pre-established given, but
rather both depend upon the student's lived world of experience. If the
expression "You are what you know" makes sense in this context,
it might also be said that "You are your achieved relations with the
world" and "Your world is your achieved relations with others."
To clarify this sense of achieved relations, let me borrow from the Confucian
tradition. In a Confucian way of thinking, neither teacher nor student
would be what they are without the achievement of a relatedness and process
called education. Teacher alone without student, or teacher without the
relatedness and process of education would be a meaningless and impossible
conception. Student alone without teacher, or student without the relatedness
and process of education can never be student. Each individual is what
one is by virtue of the achievement of lived relations. Teacher becomes
teacher and student becomes student simultaneously when and only when education
occurs. The achievement of relatedness comes first, and individuation and
identity arises out of that achievement. Neither who one is nor one's world
as student are pre-established and fixed given facts. They are not matters
of subjective resolve or invention. The nature of self and reality are
accomplishments that arise through one's negotiation through lived experience.
Thus Confucianism employs a language of relations rather than the language
of individual things.
Viewed in this light, it makes sense to say that humanity is an achievement,
not a given set of attributes and not an imaginary construct. Furthermore,
if humanity is not achieved, then there can be no genuine teacher or genuine
student. Education would be a meaningless impossibility, for that relatedness
and process of education presupposes the unfolding possibilities and openness
of achieved human beings. If humanity is an achievement, then service-learning
provides an opportunity for attaining it in action that is an inherent
part of education but not available within the classroom because of its
own world of rewards and motivations. Thus, service-learning may be an
appropriate and effective method for revitalizing the role humanity plays
in education.
Service-learning may help to uncover a profound commonality that is
shared by service-learning and academic disciplines: the attainment of
each is preceded by a stage of relinquishment. The performance and appreciation
of service-learning is attainable only after assumptions that formerly
drove most actions in school and elsewhere are relinquished and found to
be no longer operative. The same is true in academic disciplines. The shift
to seeing and living as a biologist, for example, is preceded by a relinquishment
of former assumptions that initially drive the study of biology. To continue
the example, as long as a student persists in objectifying biology and
its concerns, the student continues to think within the language of individual
things: biology, tests, grades, terms, teacher, and specimens. The biologist
as biologist, however, is not interested in specimens for their own sake,
but rather in the logos, their logic of relations to which the specimens
point as clues. Attaining the eye and questing mind of the biologist occurs
when former assumptions about what constitutes the study are relinquished
and replaced by a relation-based model. The logos suffix of the
term biology means more that "the study of" a field, it refers
to the Way, the elusive principle of order and meaning that underlies the
world. The various academic disciplines generally share this notion of
logos as a model. Undergoing the process of relinquishment and attainment
within service-learning can be an effective key that a teacher can use
to unlock the similar process that constitutes the attainment of the heart
of an academic discipline. Rather than an extracurricular activity, service-learning
may be a pathway to the core of a discipline when more didactic curricular
activities fail.
The most potent element of the service-learning arrangements that I
have employed has been the reflection paper. Selecting a suitable disciplinary
problem for the paper is at first a daunting task for the student, but
with help from the teacher, the student learns how inquiry proceeds within
the discipline to find challenges within initially unrelated experiences.
At a certain point, a light shines in the student's eyes and the search
for a topic is no longer a problem. The student next returns, usually bringing
questions about resources and methodology within the discipline. Again
we do philosophy. Students take charge and do philosophy rather than listen
to me talk about it. So it proceeds until the paper is turned in, read
and returned. At that point, I like to send the students back to the service
site with the task of testing their paper conclusions. In actuality, however,
the end of the semester is usually so filled with other class requirements
that this final phase of conclusion testing seldom reaches its consummation.
Nevertheless, the process of working on the reflection papers has seldom
ended wanting academic richness.
School life engenders frustrations, joys, and cause for gratitude that
seldom find suitable occasions for their expression in school. It may be
that this ironic condition heightens frustrations and diminishes joys,
and if this is true, then a very important function can be fulfilled by
service-learning. Service-learning as selfless giving can be rendered as
an act of gratitude that vents or expresses unnamed frustrations and joys.
Perhaps this is why service-learning experiences seem to tap wellsprings
of affective richness, even within intellectual discussions. Service-learning
encourages the affective and real-world conditions of a student's life
to be as much a natural part of academia as the conceptual.
My two young sons and I weed and transplant bromeliads in a corner of
a schoolyard. "Do we have to?" they ask plaintively at the beginning
of each work session, but when work is done, they talk glowingly about
the experiences gained and the things learned. They even compare and boast
of their scratches. They see their father alongside them work on a task
that does not yield the usual answers to their question "Do we have
to?" and work takes on a different cast. When talk glows with the
achievements and insights of a different light, everything changes. Values
clarify, words become grounded and relationships grow. Service-learning
is genuine learning.
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