Discussion
Examining some of the "critical questions" that surround the service-learning pedagogy, Kraft (1996) brought into discussion the issue of community participation and involvement. In his article, he wrote that "[t]he opportunities for cross-cultural learning are greatly enhanced if the service partners are engaged in written and verbal reflection that is shared with each other throughout the service experience" (p. 137). He also implied that, for the most part, that has not been the case with most service-learning projects.
I want to start this discussion of results by emphasizing the importance of community engagement. Every time esteemed pedagogue Paulo Freire wrote or talked about liberation pedagogy or liberation education, he made a point of stressing how important it is to engage the oppressed and their community into the educational process itself:
A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students, co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating knowledge… In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement (1998, p. 51).
It is precisely this "committed involvement" from the part of the community that could guarantee the success of service-learning projects. By actively engaging the school's principal and staff, the students' parents, and the media literacy organization, I not only sought the advice of those directly affected by the project's outcomes, but also successfully secured their participation, while raising the stakes for their personal investment in the program.
Some of the questions that now come to my mind and that perhaps should be considered by instructors planning similar courses include the following: Could I, as a university instructor with very limited knowledge of elementary school education, have known which media literacy curriculum was the most adequate for those students' age and skills range? Could I have developed a course that attended to the specific needs of the community without knowing exactly where my students would be placed? Perhaps, but it is arguable that, with a less collaborative planning process, the project's outcomes would not have been as successful as they were. This article itself, written in consultation with the various community and educational partners involved in the media literacy project, attests to the positive, long-term effects of that collaboration.
The community involvement aspect also helps to address some of the other critical questions posed at the beginning of this article. The workload issues discussed by Wade (1997), for example, were partially alleviated because of the shared responsibilities between educational and community partners. Likewise, the question posed by Kahne and Westheimer (1996) regarding the extent to which the content of service-learning classes should be "political" also surfaced during the collaborative planning stages. Based on their previous community experiences, both the media literacy leader and the school principal anticipated and shared with the university instructor some of the ethnic-, language-, and class-based questions that were likely to surface throughout the semester. Those discussions influenced the instructor to adopt course textbooks that directly addressed some of those issues.
Additionally, the CSUMB students also contributed to raising the critical level of the course. By critically reflecting on their service-learning experience, as well as on their own personal issues of race, class and gender, the students questioned the validity of their jobs as workshop leaders (they wondered if they should be the ones telling CCES students what to watch on television and how to watch it), and they acquired a more critical perspective about the media themselves. By integrating those diverse approaches - and by making use of a curriculum that had anticipated those questions - the university students were able to position themselves more comfortably (and conscientiously) in front of the workshop classroom.
Gardner (1997) raised the question of the long-term effects of service learning on the students. This is a very valid question, which deserves special attention. At this point, it is impossible for me to tell how much students will retain from what they learned in this service-learning experience. However, judging by the many references they made in their journals and personal essays to this service-learning project as a "life-changing" experience, it is possible to infer that students will retain and employ some of what they learned in this course in their personal, academic, and professional lives.
I also want to discuss what I perceive to be some of the shortcomings of this project. The first one refers to parental participation and involvement. Media literacy projects are generally built around the assumption that parents play a fundamental role in the education of their children. Therefore, those projects rely heavily on the parents' participation and involvement. We intended to get the parents involved in the program since its inception, but we were not able to do so. Although meetings with the parents were planned, these had to be cancelled because of conflicting schedules: most CCES parents work as farm laborers and were unable to come to school during their busy farming season. We still have to find a way of securing parental involvement in future workshops.
Another shortcoming of the project related to the elementary school students' attendance and participation. Since participation in the workshop was voluntary, due to the after-class nature of the program, many students did not feel obligated to come to every one of the sessions. This fluctuating attendance was detrimental to group cohesion and continuity. Possible ways of remedying the problem include making attendance mandatory, perhaps by having the program take place as a regularly scheduled class activity, or by offering participation incentives and awards that are more appealing to the students.
A third shortcoming, pointed out by several CSUMB students in their class evaluations, related to the workshop training. Student groups had difficulty meeting out of the classroom to prepare their lesson plans because of the students' busy work and class schedules. They have suggested that, in the future, we spend more class time specifically preparing for the workshop sessions.
Future service-learning programs of this kind should pay particular attention to the integration between course content and "service" content. Levesque and Prosser (1996) and Morton and Troppe (1996) have referred to the role of content-based curriculum in service-learning courses, asking for example how much "content" should be added. And how do we make sure the process itself does not overwhelm and dictate the academic outcomes? Although a serious effort was made to guarantee the integration between the different "pulls" of the curriculum, several times throughout the semester, I did feel overwhelmed by the task of keeping those components in balance. My advice: plan ahead, give yourself time to develop the syllabus and curriculum, and make sure the service site chosen (as well as the service program implemented) match the proposed content of the course.
Notes
- The author would like to thank and acknowledge the contributions to this project made by Brenda Shinault, MLACC coordinator; Roxanne Regules, principal, and Martin Cisneros, teacher, César Chavez Elementary School.
- Students authorized the author to use excerpts from their journals and essays.
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