Tania D. Mitchell

Service Learning as a Pedagogy of Whiteness

In this article we employ whiteness as a conceptual framework to contextualize how faculty develop and implement, and consequently how students experience, service learning. A vignette that illustrates the pervasiveness of whiteness in service learning is followed by an analysis that details how whiteness frames the teaching and learning in this service learning experience. Through this example and analysis, we seek to increase instructors’ capacity and confidence to interrupt the patterns and privileges of whiteness that too often are normalized in service learning.

Using a Critical Service-Learning Approach to Facilitate Civic Identity Development

This article highlights elements of civic engagement programs that have the rich potential to facilitate civic identity development. Focusing on research with alumni, the study examines 3 civic engagement programs, the approaches of which are guided by critical service-learning. It explores elements of the experiences that alumni name as influential to their learning, development, and present commitments to understand the ways that civic engagement programs based in a critical service-learning approach can encourage them to develop commitments to active citizenship as exemplified by Knefelkamps (2008) vision of a mature sense of civic identity.

Seeking Social Justice: Undergraduates’ Engagement in Social Change and Social Justice at American Research Universities

Service-learning has often been assumed to be inherently connected to concerns of social justice, but there are few empirical studies exploring these connections. This chapter contributes to this empirical question through exploration of how students classify their community engagement experiences and the outcomes developed in the different types of experiences. Seven campuses responded to the 2014 Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) survey. We obtained a small sub-population of students who completed a survey module related to students’ participation in community engagement activities. The data demonstrate that community engagement activities are positively associated with a number of outcomes considered essential to preparing students for active engagement in a diverse democracy. While only a small number of students classify their experiences as social justice, the results observed across classifications of community engagement (e.g., charity, empowering others, social change, social justice) suggest that the different frameworks we provide students for their community engagement work may have different impacts both inside and outside the classroom.

Ethnic studies as a site for political education: Critical service learning and the California domestic worker bill of rights

Service learning in political science is driven by a commitment to expanding what is meant by civic education. Following this tradition, this article presents an example of a course informed by critical service learning centered in a grassroots social movement. Partnered with the California Domestic Workers Coalition and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, this course involved students in direct political engagement to explore cultural citizenship, the legislative process, and the possibilities and limitations of grassroots movements for social change. Challenging traditional notions of what counts as service and who counts as an expert, the example of this course speaks to the promise of service learning pedagogy as a strategy to connect students in meaningful ways to critical social issues and as a tool for political education.

Revisiting the Civic Mission of the American Public Research University

Recently, the East Bay Express published a profile on the University of California at Berkeley’s American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) program titled “Tumbling the Ivory Tower” (Burke 2015). The title suggests, and the ACES program in its implementation aims to “[break] down the ivory tower by bringing the university’s brain power to issues in the communities that surround it, and learning directly from those communities in the process” (para. 10). It is the story of a public research university implementing its civic mission. And, simultaneously, it is a story of a public research university struggling to implement its civic mission. The ACES program, once robustly supported by a gift from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, has run out of funding and is seeking to be considered an institutional priority of the university (with the institutionalized funds such prioritizing would warrant).

Preparing Students for Democratic Citizenship in a Multicultural Society: Engaging Diversity through Project Mosaik.

This study examines whether participation in a diversity initiative, Project MosaiK, helped prepare students to engage and actively address social justice issues in their residence halls. After controlling for background characteristics, findings suggest that the more students participated in Project MosaiK activities, the more likely they were to score higher on measures of multicultural consciousness, capacity for empathy across differences, and motivation to take actions for social justice.

Conclusion: Educating for social justice-learning from service-learning alumni

Using interviews from alumni of the Citizen Scholars Program, in this chapter, the author explores the participants’ definitions of social justice and the ways they enact their commitments to a more just world in order to understand how service-learning experiences can serve to support students at research universities toward taking action for a more just and equitable world.

Undergraduates’ development of citizenship at public research universities: A data-driven imperative for social justice

The purpose of this chapter is to present data related to development of students’ capacities for citizenship and engagement in social justice advocacy efforts at research universities. The authors utilized two sources of data in their analysis: (1) a current survey administered by several large, public research universities; and (2) a longitudinal series of surveys administered to ten cohorts of students across their four years or enrollment at public research universities. The data illustrate that the calls for action to develop citizenship and social justice commitments among college students are warranted given that significant numbers of college students graduate without gaining critical multicultural competencies and interpersonal skills, are not concerned with keeping abreast of social and community issues, and do not fully possess a strong commitment to community.

Community Service and Social Justice at Research Universities

The purpose of this chapter is to discover whether various community service settings or different types of community service are differentially associated with students’ engagement in social justice. Utilizing data from the Multi-institutional Study of Leadership survey, the authors discovered that all forms of community service (i.e., in a course, as part of a work-study experience, as part of a community organization, in a campus organization, or on their own) are positively associated with students’ engagement in social justice.

Introduction: Educating for Citizenship and Social Justice—Practices for Community Engagement at Research Universities

The introduction establishes the need to educate students for citizenship and social justice to develop citizens prepared to respond to the challenges of our increasingly diverse democracy. The introduction invokes three kinds of citizenship (personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented) to encourage a community engagement practice that disrupts students’ experiences to encourage them to take action in service of social justice. The introduction also offers brief outlines of each chapter in the book.