Transformative international service-learning.

Abstract

This article discusses findings from a longitudinal case study that investigated how undergraduate students experience the long-term process of transformational learning as a result of their participation in an international service-learning program. This research led to the development of a transformational learning process model for international service-learning.

Introduction

This article describes the findings of a longitudinal case study that examined how a diverse group of undergraduate students experience the forms and processes of transformational learning as a result of their participation in a well-integrated international service learning program with an explicit social justice orientation (Author, 2002, 2003). The research addresses two fundamental problems in the field of service learning. First, educators tenuously cling to the assumption that participation in service-learning results in perspective transformation (Eyler and Giles, 1999, Kellogg, 1999; Rhoads, 1997). However, research suggests that while participation in well-integrated service-learning programs can lead students to experience profound changes in their world-view, their self-concept and their understanding of social problems, such transformational learning outcomes occur rarely in domestic programs (Eyler and Giles, 1999, Rhoads, 1997). The second problem addressed by this study is the lack of empirical data to support anecdotal claims that combining service-learning pedagogy with study abroad has tremendous transformative and empowering potential (Crabtree, 1998; Grusky, 2000; Hartman & Rola, 2000; Kadel, 2002; Kraft & Dwyer, 2000). As a result, transformational learning that stems from participation in domestic and international service-learning programs tends to be ambiguous and under-theorized (Author, 2004).

This study demonstrates that service-learning can be a transformative educational medium for developing students' critical consciousness, deeper structural analysis and engagement in social action. The following sections provide a review of the theoretical and empirical research that informs this study and highlights the six dimensions of the transformational service-learning process model that resulted from this research. In addition to providing empirical evidence that participation in international service learning results in perspective transformation, the identification of six transformational learning processes has significant theoretical and practical implications for service learning practitioners.

The International Service-Learning Program Setting

Since 1994, a college in upstate New York has offered undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in a three week service-learning program in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, a resource-poor community experiencing persistent poverty. Through service-learning work and other course-based activities (i.e., seminars on health, political economy, community development, Nicaraguan history, American foreign policy and Spanish language), US students come into direct contact with Nicaraguans who are experiencing significant poverty and who maintain diverse and competing ideologies, values, beliefs and traditions. Students' primary service-learning work involves organizing and implementing health clinics in collaboration with local community members. To gain a more thorough understanding of the community's health concerns, students also conduct participatory research with community members, participate in community dialogues, attend seminars given by health, government and neighborhood leaders, and volunteer at the local hospital. Students have conducted health assessments and distributed medicine that literally saved lives! Given the intense and profound nature of the interactions and outcomes that result from their service-learning work, U.S. students forge powerful relationships with Nicaraguans as they traverse the transformational learning journey.

Theoretical Framework

Mezirow's (1991, 2000) transformational learning model provides a useful theoretical framework for evaluating transformational learning processes in service-learning. Mezirow (2000) describes transformational learning as a process whereby learners make meaning of their experience through critical reflection on assumptions and engage in rational discourse in order to arrive at more dependable and justifiable "meaning perspectives" or "flames of reference" for guiding individual and social action. Mezirow (1991, 2000) provides a model for transformational learning, which includes the following non-sequential components: 1) A disorienting dilemma, 2) self-examination with feelings of fear, anger, guilt or shame, 3) a critical assessment of assumptions, 4) recognition that one's discontent and the process of transformation are shared, 5) exploration of options for new roles, relationships, and actions, 6) planning a course of action, 7) acquiring knowledge and skills for implementing one's plans, 8) provisionally trying new roles 9) building competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships 10) a reintegration into one's life on the basis of conditions dictated by one's new perspective (Mezirow, 2000, p. 22). According to Mezirow (2000), the forms of perspective transformation and the actions that result depend on the unique circumstances that one is experiencing. Because people bring diverse biographies, experiences, self-concepts, motivations and expectations into different educational contexts there is still a tremendous amount of debate on what constitutes a significant change in perspective (Taylor, 2000). This study builds on Mezirow's theory to provide service-learning educators with a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering transformational learning in international service learning.

A review of empirical research on student learning in international service-learning suggests that participation in service-learning programs overseas increases students' intercultural competence, language skills, tolerance for ambiguity, and experiential understanding of complex global problems (Crabtree, 1998; Myers-Lipton, 1994, Pyle, 1981). More recent studies have found that international service-learning has a positive impact on students' intercultural sensitivity, intellectual development, and sense of global citizenship (Fitch, 2004; Hartman & Heinisch, 2003; Monard-Weissman, 2003; Porter & Monard, 2001). While these studies have broadened our understanding of learning outcomes unique to international service-learning contexts there is very little understanding of the processes of learning that lead to such outcomes.

Methodology

A longitudinal case study design (Merriam, 1998) provided a useful qualitative approach for exploring how undergraduate students from the U.S. experienced the long-term forms and processes of transformational learning during and after participation in the international service-learning program in Nicaragua (Author, 2002). Forty-three students participated in five separate cohorts between 1994 and 2001. Twenty-two students representing each of the five cohorts participated in this study.

Data gathering methods included on-site participant observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. My role as co-facilitator of the program in Nicaragua form 1994-2001 enabled extensive on-site participant-observation of students' involvement in program activities and corroboration of the nature of specific events during post-trip interviews during 2001-2002. Particular attention was devoted to observing learning processes embedded in participants' reactions to critical incidents, the physical setting, service activities, and social interaction. Extensive field notes were recorded each year. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each study participant (n=22) from May 2001 to May 2002. These interviews specifically focused on the long-term transformative impact of the program, the meaning of their perspective transformation over time, and the actions that resulted. Document analysis entailed an in-depth review of pre- and post-trip questionnaires, photographs, student journals, final reflection papers and post-trip contracts or "covenants" for future action.

A constant comparative method of analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1973) was used to integrate a substantial body of qualitative data and identify emergent patterns associated with the meanings study participants attributed to their ongoing transformational learning experience (Merriam, 1998; Patton, 2002). Ongoing member checks with study participants, debriefing with peers, and an audit trail helped ensure consistency and trustworthiness in the analysis, interpretation and representation of the data (Patton, 2002).

Findings

The study identified six elements of the transformational learning process in international service-learning: contextual border crossing, dissonance, personalizing, processing, and connecting. These six themes expand on Mezirow's (2000) model and provide a useful conceptual framework for service-learning educators who are interested in facilitating transformational learning. While the fields of service learning and study abroad have traditionally focused on outcomes, the results of this study allow educators to better understand how students experience the long-term process of transformational learning in service-learning.

Contextual border crossing

The transformational learning experience for study participants, who are predominantly US citizens, white, middle class, and female, cannot be explained without understanding the individual, structural, programmatic and historical aspects of the context that they carry with them across the border between the US and Nicaragua. The study identified structural (i.e., race, class, gender, and nationality), personal (i.e., biography, personality, learning style, and sense of efficacy), historical (i.e., the socio-economic, and political history of Nicaragua and US-Nicaragua relations) and programmatic factors (i.e., intercultural immersion, social justice focus, direct service-work and opportunities for critical reflection and dialogue) as important contextual dimensions that influenced students' ongoing transformational learning experience. Contextual border crossing is a complex transformational learning process of re-positioning oneself--a cognitive, affective and behavioral shift across physical, personal, social, cultural, political, economic, and historically structured borders. As students cross borders, these four contextual categories help frame and shape a transformational learning process in which students begin to recognize and unpack previously invisible aspects of their social, cultural, political and economic location on a global map of power relations and critically re-evaluate their identity, position and social status.

Dissonance

Upon arrival in Nicaragua, students experience a radical encounter with multiple and often intense forms of dissonance. This study revealed that students experienced different types of dissonance during participation in international service-learning activities (i.e., historical, environmental, physical, economic, political, cultural, spiritual, social communicative and technological forms of dissonance), and that the intensity and duration of dissonance impacted the persistence of students' transformational learning. Immersion in a new and unfamiliar cultural milieu and direct contact with human suffering through service work poses a "disorienting dilemma" for participants. Students struggle to adjust their cognitive and affective lenses in order to reconcile scenes of poverty that contradict their previous expectations and assumptions about the resilience of the human spirit.

Students express a variety of powerful emotions when they experience dissonance directly related to economic injustice and poverty. This type of high intensity dissonance and students' emotional response to it demands not only an intellectual and personal response (of which there are no easy answers) and accountability, but also a transformational learning process that is more apt to lead to greater solidarity and action upon returning to the U.S.

Personalizing

Service work in Nicaragua puts students in direct contact with Nicaraguans who live in extreme poverty, and this experience often triggers visceral emotional reactions that cause students to assess their personal strengths and critique their weaknesses. Students report that direct confrontation with the human face of poverty cannot be "intellectualized or rationalized away." Personal involvement with Nicaraguans and observation of their suffering leads to a sense that these problems "demand immediate attention." The experience also generates a sense of moral obligation and "personal responsibility" to respond to problems that affect the global poor and foment social change. One student explained that scenes of poverty on television had little impact on her, but going to Nicaragua "you are surrounded by it. It becomes part of your every day experience, so you have to deal with it ... and hopefully you are able to incorporate it in your value system and your moral system and try to figure out where these people are coming from ..."

Processing and connecting

This study found that there was an interdependent and dialectical relationship between affective and reflective processes of transformational learning in international service-learning. Processing represented the ways in which students engaged in various reflective and dialogic modes of learning to re-evaluate the validity of their assumptions or to find answers to the social problems they were witnessing firsthand. However, processing cannot be fully understood without the affective aspects of transformational learning in which students developed deeper more empathic relationships with Nicaraguans who were struggling with poverty. Whereas processing emphasizes the students' critical reflection and discourse on the structural forces that influence the origin of and solution to economic disparities and injustice in Nicaragua, connecting involves listening, understanding, empathizing and struggling with Nicaraguans as allies. In addition to trying to "figure out" and/or "question" the nature of the problems they encountered, they learned by caring, supporting and listening to community members and their peers.

Emerging global consciousness

Emerging global consciousness (EGC) represents both a transformational learning outcome and process that stems from participation in international service-learning. EGC signifies an emerging critical awareness of complex relations of power and of how identity, position and the ability to act autonomously are socially and culturally structured. EGC is also characterized by a dynamic, ongoing and multifaceted shift in study participants' frame of reference along at least one of six domains: political, moral, intellectual, cultural, personal and spiritual. Each of the "forms" above give further meaning to the shape perspective transformation takes as a result of the service-learning experience. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, EGC represents a conceptual shift toward developing a deeper understanding of what it means to be a global citizen.

Immediately upon return to the US, participants expressed "hopeful" intentions to act on their emerging global consciousness and promote social justice by changing their lifestyle, relationships and social institutions to coincide with their heightened awareness of global inequalities and disparities. However, over the long-term students often faced challenges in learning how integrate their emerging global consciousness (along one or more of the six learning domains), and in taking actions to promote social justice on a variety of personal and interpersonal levels upon re-entry into the U.S. The study refers to these challenges as the "chameleon complex," which represents the negotiation of identity in social situations and within social institutions where participants" emerging critical awareness conflicts with dominant and mainstream ways of thinking and acting.

Discussion

This longitudinal case study identified a transformational learning process pattern that emerged from the data. The transformational learning process represented the following six dimensions: contextual border crossing, dissonance, personalization, processing and connecting and emerging global consciousness. Each of the dimensions describes how students experienced the transformational learning process as it related to their participation in international service-learning activities.

By identifying contextual factors that influence the form and process of transformational learning in international service-learning, the study findings contribute empirical and theoretical insight to prior service-learning studies that had identified the forms of transformation in service-learning but had ignored the role of specific context factors in shaping the form of transformation (Eyler & Giles, 1999; Rhoads, 1997). While Rhoads (1997) found that "crossing borders" of race, class, and gender are important aspects of the learning process that occurs in service-learning, his study does not give adequate attention to the relationship among the various structural, historical, personal and in particular, programmatic aspects of the context that lead some students and not others to develop a more caring self (p. 124). Similarly, Eyler & Giles (1999) suggested that "well-integrated programs" are strong predictors of perspective transformation, but they did not adequately explore the various dimensions of such programs (i.e., placement quality, diversity, reflection, application and community voice), the relationships among them and how contextual factors interact to foster the process of transformation. Based on empirical evidence this study implies that in order to understand the forms and processes of transformational learning in service-learning programs, the relationship among the personal, structural, historical and programmatic contextual factors must be made explicit.

The longitudinal nature of this study provided a unique look at the role of different types of dissonance over a longer period of time. For example, eight years after participating in the program, Karen's attempts to stay involved in social justice issues are fueled by the dissonance she experienced living with the orphanage children. Four years after going to Nicaragua, Beth, continues to refer to the plight of Nicaraguan women and children and how she draws from that every day for personal strength and also to continue to raise awareness about global poverty and human rights issues in the global studies classes that she teaches at a local high school. Importantly, certain types of high level dissonance can actually become more intense over time. The familiar adage "time heals old wounds" is not often the case in international service-learning. High intensity forms of "dissonance" that stems from directly experiencing poverty for the first time--does not go away and remains with the student as a permanent fixture within his/her new cultural frame of reference.

The study also found that the process dimension of personalizing is similar to the second step in Mezirow's model in which he theorized a pattern entailing "self-examination with feelings of fear, anger, guilt or shame" (2000, p. 22). However, unlike Mezirow's (2000) model, and service-learning (Eyler& Giles, 1999) theory which privilege rational, cognitive processing of dissonance through reflection and view emotions as something to be managed or controlled, this study confirms the central importance of the emotional and visceral aspects of transformational learning. The dimension of personalizing builds on and adds emotional and visceral knowledge to Rhoad's (1997) study where he found that students who were working with the homeless in D.C. were "more likely to personalize their social concerns and thus more willing to become involved in work for social change" (p. 7). Since the role of emotions and visceral elements of learning are undertheorized in service-learning, the dimension of personalizing points to the importance of identifying and exploring the role emotions play in fostering transformation in service-learning contexts. This study found that processing and connecting were dialectical learning processes that students engaged in to better understand ill-structured problems and dissonant experiences.

The processing dimension supports previous theoretical and empirical studies that found the process of reflection is an important component of the transformational learning process in service-learning (Eyler & Giles, 1999; Rhoads, 1997). However, the identification of connecting as integrally related to processing in terms of understanding the international service-learning experience has significant implications for service-learning theory and practice. The learning process of connecting supports previous empirical studies in service-learning that found that direct interaction with diverse members of the community through service work has an influence on students' perspective transformation (Eyler & Giles, 1999) and in becoming more conscious of the relational character of their identity (Rhoads, 1997). In addition, findings from this study suggest that critical reflection combined with affective forms of learning provided the necessary and crucial integrative link to fostering the process of transformational learning. Reflection that occurs through processing has little significance in terms of students' sense of empathy, long-term solidarity with Nicaraguans and commitment to working for greater social justice unless it is understood in terms of affective learning, the intimate, personal, visceral, and deeply felt connections that students have with Nicaraguans living on the margins while situated in communities of service-work. Connecting, however, cannot be assimilated unless one processes it in some manner, whether it is through informal and formal reflective conversations with fellow students, faculty and community members who together attempt to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct meaning in sharing the collective experience of service work. One of the most important empirical and theoretical contributions this study makes to the previous research and theory in service-learning is that transformational learning is more apt to persist over the long-term if there are opportunities for reflective and affective learning processes to take place.

Because a majority of students examined in this research described their transformational service-learning journey as a profound, life-altering experience, the findings indicate that the international service-learning experience triggered students' perspective transformation and, in contrast to prior studies (Eyler & Giles, 1999, Rhoads, 1997), occurred with greater frequency. Although the nature of the transformational learning journey was found to be ongoing, recursive and unique for each participant in this study, a number of students reported experiencing transformative learning in one or more of the following six transforming forms: political, moral, intellectual, cultural, personal, and spiritual. These six overlapping areas represented different sets of assumptions or presuppositions that had been identified as making up parts of students' shifting worldview, and importantly, continued to transform in relation to how students experienced the process of international service-learning and their life circumstances.

Chameleon complex is perhaps the most provocative finding that emerged from this study because it challenges the notion that transformational learning is a progressive, developmental shift in consciousness that is "integrative" of experience (Mezirow, 2000). The ongoing struggle represented by the learning process entailed in chameleon complex raises important practical, political and ethical concerns related to fostering transformational learning in service-learning, and suggests a need for further research into the potential risks associated with translating individual perspective transformation into social actions that challenge unjust and oppressive aspects of the status quo. The chameleon complex suggests that transformational learning for social justice is more about learning how to resist adaptation to the status quo. In some contexts, (i.e., counter-hegemonic social movements and educational programs that promote social justice), cultural adaptation and integration may actually be antithetical to the process of transformational learning. Eight years after participating in the international service-learning program in Nicaragua, Karen provides a compelling metaphor that captures the ongoing struggle inherent in the chameleon complex, "I am like a fish out of water ... I don't fit in anymore ... I am a fish with legs ... so what do l do? I go back in the water with legs on ..."

Conclusion

By identifying and unpacking the different elements in each of the six transformational learning process dimensions and by describing the connections among them, this transformational learning model sheds light on how students experience the process of transformational learning in international service-learning. The six transformational learning processes discussed above provide service-learning practitioners with a useful conceptual model for fostering perspective transformation in both domestic and international service-learning program contexts. It is hoped that future research will examine more closely each of the transformational learning processes in this model in diverse settings to provide additional empirical evidence confirming that the transformative potential of service-learning is not just hopeful speculation.

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Richard Kiely, The University of Georgia 

Richard Kiely, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education