'Learning Service' in International Contexts: Partnership-based Service-Learning and Research in Cape Town, South Africa

In this paper we explore an approach to developing and implementing service-learning and community-based research in a study-abroad program in Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on a notion of partnerships reflecting the values of accompaniment and transparency, and influenced by the importance of learning service, we outline an intentional, engaged pedagogy and program design emphasizing collaborative inquiry and partnership development. However, such an approach is challenging and demands that we include an ontological project as part of our work. This, we believe, is crucial if global service-learning (GSL), often taking place in the Global South, is to become a robust, critical, and ethical practice. ********** For our programs, transparency begins with our own preparations with our own students, a reflexive understanding that even the nature of service is a shared construction and not something we bring whole cloth into the service locale. (Simonelli, Earle, & Story, 2004, p. 54) [T]he reading . assigned for our first seminar, 'Learning Service or Service Learning: Enabling the Civic' (Boyle-Baise et al., 2006) has shown me that service is truly not monolithic. I finally understand what the authors meant when they said, 'Service can be deconstructed in order that students might puzzle through it from the inside-out' (p. 25). It took for me to truly become engaged with [organization] in order to allow the experience to break down every preconception I had of what it meant to 'serve' others. (student reflection, 2012) A number of debates have surfaced recently about higher education's role in relation to issues of globalization and argue for curricula that take on these issues. Nussbaum (2007), for instance, suggests that because higher education produces the next generation of citizens, we need to ask ourselves about the kinds of civic values, dispositions, and attributes our students should hold as they go out into the world. Global service-learning and community-based research, as forms of community engagement, are seen as important practices in this regard and are argued to have a huge impact on students' sense of self and identity formation (Engberg & Fox, 2011; Fitch, 2004). They can be important ways of providing transformative learning spaces, which contribute to a student's way of being and engaging in the world (Bamber, 2008; Monard-Weissman, 2003a, 2003b). This impact is often heightened when students are involved internationally (Crabtree, 2008; Hartman, 2014; Kiely, 2004, 2005; King, 2004). In this paper, we discuss the development and implementation of service-learning and community-based research in a Stanford University study-abroad program located in Cape Town, South Africa. We describe our sustained partnership approach along lines suggested by Simonelli, Earle, and Story (2004) where partnership is about accompaniment and transparency in a context where inequality is rapidly increasing. We argue for an engaged pedagogy and program design emphasizing collaborative inquiry and learning service (Boyle-Baise et al., 2006). Learning service, that is, understanding the different possible meanings of the word so that one can learn and reflect on how to truly be of service to community members, is challenging and requires an intentional curriculum that engages students in community relationships and critical reflection. Because it is challenging, we include an ontological dimension to our work (Barnett & Coate, 2005)--we reflect intentionally on our own meaning and understanding of the world and ourselves in it as part of our practice. It is these considerations and features of our program that we believe contribute to the understanding of global service-learning (GSL). (1) Background Stanford University's Bing Overseas Studies Program in Cape Town opened to students in January 2010 after a long gestation period. The story began in the 1970s when Anthropology Professor James Gibbs advocated with the Stanford Overseas Studies office to open a center outside of Europe where its existing five centers were then located. …