I am pleased to be part of a learning community of faculty members who teach SL courses at Wright State. In our second meeting today, we discussed the origins of SL and differences in terminology. Many SL experts have tied the origins of SL to John Dewey and public education; however, some are making arguments now that it ties back to our forefathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, asserting that public education is a right. SL is a relatively "young" pedagogy. SL, as it is taught today, really dates back to the early 1990s when higher education institutions started placing more emphasis on civic engagement.
Civic engagement (where it is most used, in the context of higher education) is often considered an umbrella term, to indicate that many facets of the University will engage in the community, including student organizations as well as SL coursework. As higher education officials, faculty and staff continue to place an emphasis on engaging with the surrounding community, terminology is often debated. One college in Ohio labels it's equivalent of our Office of Service Learning as the Office of Experiential Education and Service Learning.
Eyler & Giles discuss in their text, Where's the Learning in Service-Learning?, that service-learning should include the hyphen, as it connects the terms as equals, gives equal weight to service and learning and implies the reciprocal relationship between the two.
We discussed different phrases and terminology used by the experts, including experiential education, public work, community service, etc.. Some highlights of the discussion included:
- Service learning is offensive to some, as they feel it indicates a level of condescension; I'm serving you because I have and you have not.
- Some faculty don't care for the label "community service" because that implies some image of punitive, mandated service
- Some faculty preferred "public work" because public includes everyone, whereas community makes one wonder who decides what community is, and who belongs to it.