Citizenship Service Learning: Becoming Citizens by Assisting Immigrants

ideas, this is what most of us take for granted and forget that PSOnline www.apsanet.org 565 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Tue, 13 Dec 2016 04:36:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms not everybody is in the same boat. I really feel that I, we, have a certain responsibility not to forget and to help whenever and wherever possible. Although not all students achieve the expectations set out for them in this project, their struggle in the early stages are to move beyond their own biographies and overcome feelings of inadequacy and disinterest. Most students engage their work along these lines; some of them of course do not. Gradually, the process begins to show results. As many students find they are up to the challenge, they begin working in a collaborative spirit. They find the time to meet and begin to create a social product. One student claimed: This (project) is all about a group working together towards making a difference in the community, and creating a new program at the college. What makes it more gratifying is that without the other-students and immigrants-our goals would not have been achieved. By the project's end, the first student's fears had been replaced by a sense of wonder that the project really did make a difference in the lives of community residents. I never saw so many smiles on people's faces. I didn't feel uncomfortable or timid at all at that point to answer any questions they had.... I even got a chance to speak a little Portuguese with somebody in their 50s who was there with his sister to bring their 82 year old mother to fill out her application. He must have shaken my hand and said thank you about 50 times. Similarly, the second student's initial fear turned to "an adrenaline rush" as all the plans became real. I was not expecting to see what I saw when I opened those doors. The room looked fantastic. It was exactly as envisioned on the classroom board. The tables were set up just as imagined, there were posters, signs, and flags. I was in a state of disbelief..,. unaware of our potential. I just did not give us enough credit.... By 9:30, people were arriving, adrenaline was rushing, excitement was building. All our months of hard work and commitment finally realized. Let the Games begin. Discussion and Conclusion CSL is designed to challenge quiescent students and citizens to become stakeholders in their own communities. To be successful, it must also address the causes of such quiescence and anomie. CSL is meant to overcome three weaknesses of traditional pedagogy that combine to produce an apathetic citizenry: 1) Academic disciplines have become increasingly isolated in this century with the development of the modern research university and the corresponding development of discrete areas of specialization; 2) "Rigor" within higher education has progressively come to mean isolated specialization within a discipline, and 3) Pedagogical rigor has come to mean those techniques that support this isolation. The concept-centered basis of traditional classroom instruction alone is inadequate to provide education for the well-prepared citizen. Through symbolic presentations, students learn methods of collecting information, but not methods of processing and critically evaluating that information in a real-time setting (Aronowitz and Giroux 1985). While professors present information and evoke responses to questions, the merits and shortcomings of different social science perspectives are not carefully tested, nor are the teacher's own interpretations of specific knowledge (Gimenez 1989, 185). As professors lead the class, students primarily receive information, take notes, memorize facts, and prepare for exams. In this situation, "the professor is empowered to speak and to act while the student is constrained to listen, to take notes, and to accept. The result . . . victimizes students by denying their competence and undermining their sense of subjective agency, ultimately reproducing classrooms and cultures of silence" (Wright 1989, 194). Such factors hardly contribute a training ground for proactive citizenship. Rather, they reinforce higher education's increasing isolation from the real world. As the ever-prescient Alexis de Tocqueville warned, "in disengaging the classroom from realworld settings, schools ... fail to do their job and democracy ... fail(s) to secure the responsible citizens it needs to flourish" (quoted in Barber 1997). Tocqueville hits the mark. According to a recent Times-Mirror poll (1990), young citizens "know less ... about news and public affairs than any other generation of Americans in the past fifty years." Moreover, only a third of Americans trust the government to do the right thing, according to a 1998 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the Public and the Press. A recent Carnegie Foundation report claims, "If there is a crisis in education in the United States today, it is less that test scores have declined than it is that we have failed to provide the education for citizenship that is still the most important responsibility of the nation's schools and colleges" (Newman 1985, 3:1). If Jurgen Habermas is correct in claiming that "the institutions of constitutional freedom are only worth as much as a population makes of them" (quoted in Calhoun 1992, 7), then America's democratic institutions are endangered by too narrow a focus on passive legal-status citizenship. Harkavy and Puckett give voice to this concern as it relates to the role of higher education, writing "Colleges and universities can no longer afford the luxury of being inward looking, relatively selfcontained and unconcerned about producing useful knowledge 'for the betterment of humanity.' Nor can they operate with such a threadbare moral purpose" (1992, 32). Under such conditions, a crucial opportunity is lost to provide skills and direction for a multi-faceted and active role for prospective citizens in the civic marketplace (Dewey 1916; Coleman 1977). CSL provides just such a process of active learning for citizenship that prepares young adults for lives of active participation. Such CSL projects as C-Day are not without their problems. Some students com566 PS September 1998 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Tue, 13 Dec 2016 04:36:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms plain about "free riders" in their midst and that the process was too messy, inefficient, and lacking in direction. A couple of students contended that CBO's were not serious about collaborating with college students. Others found it difficult to take the time from traditional school work and jobs. Involvement in the project does not mean that all the students come to value becoming fully proactive citizens. CSL is not meant to indoctrinate students to favor immigration. It encourages critical inquiry about the nuances of immigration and citizenship--why it is, for example, that a nation of immigrants has always been ambivalent about immigration? It also provides tools for enhancing tolerance, engaging people from different cultures, problem solving, reflection, and critical inquiry. Even opponents of immigration recognize they will benefit from the skills they gained while participating in CSL, and, given the opportunity, they say they would do it again.