Service Learning
Critical Questions
There seems to be less agreement among researchers, however, on some critical questions that surround the service-learning "movement." One of those controversies concerns the extent to which the content of service-learning classes should be "politicized." Kahne and Westheimer (1996), for example, believe that experiential education proponents should make a clear distinction between charity and service learning. In their opinion, faculty will be able to help students truly understand the economic, social, ethnic, cultural, and gender-based factors that contribute to social problems only by doing a systematic analysis of the social problems they are examining or dealing with in their courses. By achieving a new and more sophisticated level of comprehension, students would then be able to see themselves (and community members) as agents for social change. Kahne and Westheimer recognize, however, that "many current service activities emphasize altruism and charity and fail to call into question current notions of individualism or to encourage the type of political participation that furthers democracy" (p. 597).
Likewise, Gardner (1997) has questioned the depth of the long-term effects of service learning on students and the level of commitment on the part of school districts and universities now purporting to embrace the concept. Kraft (1996), on the other hand, has asked similar questions from the perspective of community partners: what are the long-term effects of service-learning projects on community organizations and, maybe even more importantly, how much community input have schools and universities looked for when designing and implementing service-learning programs?
Other critical questions refer to the role of content-based curricula in service learning courses. For example, how much "content" should be added? How do we make sure the process itself does not overwhelm and dictate the academic outcomes? (Levesque and Prosser, 1996; Morton and Troppe, 1996). Other concerns include the mandatory character of many service-learning programs, which some critics have characterized as "involuntary servitude" (Gardner, 1997, p. 17); the role of critical reflection in the learning process (Eyler et al., 1996); and the extra workload for instructors, who many times have to restructure their courses to incorporate the service-learning component and at the same time must deal with what Wade has characterized as a "logistical nightmare" (1997).
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