Enhancing Students' Sensibilities of Membership, Connection, Responsibility, and Purpose.

Abstract

Service-learning is a particularly conducive means of creating settings with great potential for students to come of age. This research draws on multiple modes of ethnographic data gathered during the International Service-Learning Experience (ISLE) course. We focus on students' emerging sensibilities of membership, connection, responsibility and purpose and the implications that these new perceptions about self and other have for finding their place in the world.

Introduction

Young adults pursuing an undergraduate education stand in the doorway of opportunity. They linger in the liminal space between "teen" and "adult", between being "home" and finding a meaningful place in the larger world.

This transitional period is a critical time, a threshold, that van Gennep (1960) notes holds both unique dangers and great potential for growth. It is important that they engage in pedagogical experiences that help them make connections across the different areas of their lives and that link classroom practice with community applications.

Service-learning programs can provide transformative experiences that help students situate themselves in the world. The goal of this paper is to provide insight into perceptual shifts students made in our International Service-Learning Experience (ISLE). We highlight four interdependent sensibilities of membership, connection, responsibility and purpose. We are interested in seeing how these new orientations help students locate themselves relative to others, particularly as they think about possible roles that they could play as citizens in a global village.

We approach the issue of understanding students' enhanced perceptions from a framework of situated learning within communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Situated learning looks at the richness of learning in "complex social environments and concrete situations" (Wolfson & Willinsky, 1998, p.23). By trying out new skills in supervised, communal settings that stretch their horizons, participants experience "the transformative possibilities of being and becoming complex, full cultural-historical participants in the world" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 32).

In the ISLE program we aimed to forge bonds among course participants, between our group and our community partners, and between what they were learning in academic settings and what we could accomplish together in the field. ISLE brought together a diverse set of people who probably would not have otherwise met on a large, urban, Research I campus. The sixteen students came from majors as diverse as biology, pre-law, and Russian. We modeled cross-disciplinary and cross-status collaboration in our co-leadership team too, creating a partnership that included an undergraduate, graduate, faculty member, and staff coordinator. In the early weeks of the course, each person created and shared their own list of priorities and goals for participating. One of the core uniting themes was claiming a place in the larger world.

Discussing and experiencing service-learning was an integral part of the course, not an add-on to the "regular" curriculum. During the first half of the semester, students studied theories of service-learning and situated learning. As a means of grounding these otherwise abstract concepts, we also prepared to go to Bolivia on an extended Alternative Spring Break. We presented background reports about our community partners, did outreach and fundraising activities, discussed readings about becoming global citizens, and learned some basic Andean cultural modes of interacting. After our return, we came full circle, effectively "bookending" the hands-on learning by finishing a cumulative series of essays and 3-D models representing students' new insights.

The data for this article come from participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the first author (Porter) as a co-leader of ISLE. In the years since the initiation of ISLE, additional cohorts of students have participated in (international) service-learning programs and some have begun increasingly sophisticated analyses of their own and others' perceptual shifts. The second author's (Rapoport) interests in investigating complex modes of hands-on, situated learning are an example of the latter.

It is useful to look at the relationships between the four sensibilities as being metaphorically like the bonds that give cohesion to a molecule. Each element has core features that define its unique properties as well as features that are potentially combinable with other sensibilities. Each is a dynamic system unto itself, but one that can be complemented, and thereby fully balanced, by interacting with other elements. When linked in their unique geometry, the set of elements gains stability, and is less likely to break down over time. Furthermore, the set of beliefs provides a cohesive framework that can have many useful applications. It takes the right conditions to make such a reciprocal exchange possible, much less successful. It was our goal in ISLE to provide these favorable conditions, so that transformative interactions could take place and bonds could form. In the next sections we explore a few key examples of how students developed fully-balanced sensibilities of connection, membership, responsibility and purpose.

Sense of Membership

A sense of membership refers to the perception of being a legitimate member of a community of practice. It is the sense of not only being truly welcomed and accepted, but also being needed in a group in order to achieve a common goal.

Our class did not constitute an established "community" before the project. Only through repeated evening class sessions and the Alternative Spring Break, did we affirm and then unite around our defining mission: learning about service-learning and ourselves. By learning and living together students and facilitators created open, responsive spaces in which they were expected to share personal insights, fears, and successes. Together we built up a constructive "discourse by which members create meaningful statements about the world, as well as the styles by which they express their forms of membership and their identities as members" (Wenger, 1998, p.83). We took these initial positionalities as the basis for continuing membership in our evolving and expanding community.

In addition to establishing roles and rights within our own classroom community, we sought to establish meaningful relationships with members of a larger, even "global," community. Through preparing to meet our community partners, working side by side with them in difficult physical conditions, and then sharing our stories back home, students came to see themselves as members of an extended human family. Matt wrote:

   I think we are always trying to find our place in the world and that it
   changes as we grow and change. We belong to a community and most people
   identify her/himself by what community they live in. We are very different
   from the people that live in Caracollo. But it helps us to learn more about
   who we are by going there and seeing how they live, how they are the same
   and different from us... these experiences help you see who you are and
   help you to grow and change for the better.

Through ISLE students learned about the potential they had for establishing strong links to others, and discovered the advantages of joining with others for mutual benefit.

In order to help students continue to expand their ideas of groups that they could contribute to in the future, we rounded out the post-trip course with presentations by graduate students and activists who were or had been involved in international and domestic service. In these ways, they had even more models of membership for the next steps in their journeys.

Sense of Connection

Providing opportunities for students to perceive that they are legitimate members is important, but not until this sense is infused with a sense of connection can transformation begin to take place. Through ISLE, class members forged bonds with one another as well as with our community partners. The personal, reciprocal nature of the project and the open seminar format provided opportunities for them to invest themselves and to reap unexpected rewards in return. In our classroom, they were more than numbers on a course list; they became caught up in a dynamic series of cumulative interactions. As a result, we indeed found that "The members of a social relationship behave quite differently than they would as participants in a fleeting interaction" (Eitzen & Zinn, 1998, p. 26). The perception of being connected led to empathy and mutually high expectations.

We worked hard to set aside otherwise prevalent social distinctions (e.g. grade level, discipline, nationality) and to focus instead on the ways we depended on each other in order to have a successful shared outcome. Jasmine noted that this kind of collaborative classroom atmosphere was a departure from the competitive settings which marked many of her other university experiences, adding:

   I am thankful that I got to be part of such a wonderful group of people,
   the people I traveled with and the people I met while in Bolivia made this
   trip so memorable. This trip reaffirmed my belief in the human spirit. The
   people I was surrounded with brightened my day and taught me new things.
   This whole ISLE experience provided me with a better outlook on life.

She was not the only one who reported feeling more connected to ISLE classmates than those in other courses. Students also expressed a greater willingness to take risks to get to know and work collaboratively with other students in order to accomplish worthwhile projects in the future.

Spending time with others who, for the most part, worked to their capacity to try new skills and curriculum exercises, was invigorating for both the leadership team and the students. Just as important were the informal opportunities to "put a face" on what might otherwise remain the faceless, nameless "Other." Brandon conveyed the group sentiment that as a result of the joint service-learning exchanges, "I now think of Bolivians less as strangers in a different continent and more as people with whom I worked for a week and befriended in my interactions with them." Rachel added: "I have formed friendships that I will never forget and that will last forever even if I never get a chance to go back again." Thus, student responses support Jacoby's claim that "through reciprocity, students develop a greater sense of belonging and responsibility as members of a larger community" (1996, p.7).

ISLE provided a means for experiencing a sense of personal connection to others, and on the basis of those insights, of connecting enduring social issues here and abroad. Most students also drew in a third element to this dyad, linking a sense of responsibility to act on the connections that they felt as members of an international family.

Sense of Responsibility

The very concept of accepting responsibility for oneself and others was problematic to some participants at first. Too often as teenagers, it had meant obeying sometimes arbitrary roles, classroom management schedules, and prescripted ideas about how they were to make life choices. For these young adults, the term itself was ambiguous at best, and they felt a real ambivalence about accepting it as part of being an adult. Nicole explained the pivotal contribution that ISLE made for her:

   Bolivia renewed my responsibility that I allowed to slip while I was in
   college. Twenty people volunteered their spring break to build a school in
   a foreign country. This is the heart of responsibility. Taking action into
   our own hand and bringing forth a building, this is responsibility. Helping
   others to achieve their best, this is responsibility. I am beginning to
   like this word.

Believing that they could choose responsibility as a means to social transformation rather than as a sign of obedience was an empowering experience for ISLE undergraduates.

During ISLE we achieved many of our academic and service objectives. Participants saw that they were needed members of a team, that others cared about what they thought and did, and that they could choose to continue to be involved in social action. Consequently, this experience prepared students to think in terms of themselves as active participants in a larger social polity. "Citizenship," as Westheimer and Kahne point out, "requires more than kindness and decency; it requires engagement in a complex social and institutional endeavors through critical reflection, repeated links to academic disciplines and active mentoring toward socially responsive career paths" (1994).

ISLE students felt inspired to act on what they had received in the course and wrote and spoke poignantly about their desire to continue the cycle. Matt commented on the insight that he gained by taking a hard look at his personal responsibility to act. Blending Pittsburgh dialect with global insights into the complexities of service, he composed:

   [We] have to not just be content with making an existence here and then
   withering out when our time is up, we have to go out and extend our hands
   to those who need our help. Not just Joe Schmo, dahn at the end of the
   street 'an 'at. It means going to Bolivia and helping build a school for
   those who need it. It means collecting and distributing food to those
   children who have nothing to eat (whether or not they receive the food is
   another story). Injustice is around us everyday and it is not just going to
   fix itself, it takes people who have initiative to go out and correct its
   flaws.

In our case, ISLE was "an important step toward a commitment of responsibility of the individual participant to the larger community"(Kendall, 1990, p. 22). These shifts in perception and identity were yet another step in what could become a life-long journey of service and learning.

Sense of Purpose

It is not enough to have a direction in life. We must believe with Thoreau, that we can "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined." ISLE students came to understand first-hand that they could indeed make a difference. They saw that even small, local actions could have long-ranging ramifications. They saw that perseverance and focusing on a personally meaningful goal paid off.

As educators, one of the most rewarding things to see in the undergraduate participants was a marked increase in their sense of purpose in gaining an education. Nearly half of the group was undecided or drifting among majors when they entered the course. Several found new commitments to their fields. An anthropology major and a theater major confronted fundamental dilemmas in their fields, (e.g. representation, neo-colonization, partnership, and authenticity) with renewed vigor and insight.

Through the course of the semester, students shifted from seeing the goals of participating in ISLE in terms of narrow vocational terms (e.g. "It will give me experience in Latin American Studies") or career aims (e.g. "It will look good on my resume") to an opportunity for continued growth. In addition to the debriefing essays and exercises immediately after the trip, the students had a final opportunity to come back to the major themes of the course at the end of the semester. The perceptual shifts that began in January took a surge forward while in Bolivia and had not lost momentum by May. Jessica wrote:

   This trip has greatly enhanced my life and my perspectives about myself and
   the world. It has been like a catalyst that has propelled me to the next
   level of thinking in my life. I now find myself to be more motivated and
   goal oriented to achieving the ends that I only hoped for before. I have to
   believe that my place in the world is a significant one. I believe that my
   place is as a leader and an initiator of ideas and change.

Like Jessica, Amy also felt that she had gained a bold sense of efficacy, "I think my self-confidence, or maybe just the belief that I really can do almost anything emerged much more strongly because of this experience." Empowered to see themselves as agents of their own future rather than as pawns or puppets, they wanted to take charge of their education.

Students learned that they had control and could make strategic choices about the kinds of academic areas to study. They also were encouraged to reflect on how a variety of modes of learning would significantly enhance their overall "education." Most agreed with Nicole who wrote that she intended to seek out other courses that blended service with learning, "I want an education that will engage me, provide me with opportunities to make a difference, try out my hand, and make that reciprocal exchange with others." The perception that they had both the right and responsibility to craft a meaningful education helped them set high standards for their post-ISLE courses.

Conclusions

Students experienced transformative insights about themselves and theft places in the world through participating in ISLE. They each crossed critical thresholds, gaining maturity and confidence about their individual strengths and needs. As they reached out to bond with others, they found greater balance, thereby strengthening their own bases for action.

A clear sense of membership is the personal conviction that one is a legitimate member of the community of practice. This sense encourages members to contribute to a larger project and to work together with others to achieve shared goals. It is the basis for situating themselves as citizens of the global village. Drawing on a series of personally meaningful interactions, they developed a sense of personal connection. This sense allows them to risk becoming attached to others we might not see again very often, and to care about members our own community as well as those who live far away. This, in turn, complements a sense of responsibility to care for others. This sense helps students make connections between social issues in diversely situated places. Lastly, ISLE prompted participants to redefine their life-long goals and to think about "education" in more holistic terms. We believe that an enhanced sense of purpose will help bring coherence and depth to their work, no matter which fields they choose.

Service-learning is a particularly conducive means for creating settings with great potential for personal and social transformation. Meaningful interactions with diverse partners may lead to bonds that extend across situations or specific places. Structured reflections, creative writing assignments, and candid classroom discussions help make the link not only between the service and the learning, but also between the four sensibilities. The key to offering classroom experiences that enhance students' emerging perceptions is making these covalent learning goals explicit and personally relevant. Then, we need to step back and trust students to make their own paths through the portals of opportunity that we establish before them.

References

Eitzen, D. S., & Zinn, M. B. (1998). In conflict and order: Understanding society. (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Jacoby, B. a. A. (Ed.). (1996). Service-learning in higher education: concepts and practices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Kendall, J. C. a. A. (Ed.). (1990). Combining service and learning:/t resource book for community and public service. (Vol. I): National Society for Internships and Experiential Education.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Westheimer, J., & Kahne, J. (1994,). In the service of what? The politics of service learning. Paper presented at the paper presented at AERA.

Wolfson, L., & Willinsky, J. (1998). What service-learning can learn from situated learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 5, 22-31.

Maureen Porter, University of Pittsburgh, PA Liora Rapoport, University of Pittsburgh, PA

Maureen Porter is an educational anthropologist and assistant professor. Her research, teaching, and service-learning interests have to do with situated learning within communities of practice, sensibilities of place and community rituals. Liora Rapoport is a doctoral student in the Social and Comparative Analysis of Education program. Originally from Mexico, her areas of interest are rural education and development, and alternative learning practices.