Urban partnerships for international affairs service learning.

Abstract

Partnerships between universities and K-12 schools offer rich opportunities to implement international service learning, particularly in urban communities where established residents and new international populations are often residentially and socially isolated from one another. A model of university-high school collaboration is described, in which university students mentored Sudanese refugee high school women in the context of a university course on gender and global politics.

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Community service and civic education have enjoyed a recent surge in public interest. Presidential candidates for the 2004 election are already touting plans that would require community service for public high school graduates and would also allow college students to earn tuition for public service (Ramer 2003). There has also been a movement to return higher education to its broader public mission, including preparing students for responsible citizenship (Colby and Ehrlich et.al. xxxiii). While the annual Freshman Survey (CIRP 1998) indicates that freshman share a considerably lesser concern for public than for personal objectives, a full 60% of them claim "helping others in difficulty" is important, and 74% of 1998 freshman did volunteer work in high school. These data suggest students, themselves, understand the importance of community service. While young people generally claim little interest in international political affairs (Mann 1999, 263), international understanding and experience is a priority for the potential employers of today's young people (Patterson 2000). According to one director with the global business consultancy Article 13, "Managers who are capable of getting the best out of a work force that's becoming increasingly diverse, and aware of the challenges that accompany [diversity], are in huge demand" (Sappal 2003).

A strong citizenry is essential for the health of democracy (Ehrlich 1999, 245), and serving in one's community is compelling training for democratic citizenship. Much of the public debate post-September 11 has focused on the importance of cultivating international understanding, despite the typical trend for students to eschew such efforts. But since educators and administrators are already convinced of the power of community service for students (Wilkinson 2002, Young 2003), wonderful opportunities exist for educators to combine goals of community service and international understanding. This article outlines a viable technique--partnering high school and university students through service learning.

Design of the International Service Learning Project

Though I'd not previously implemented service learning in my teaching, I was fortunate to receive a small state pass-through grant to design and implement the course "Gender and Global Politics" from the Corporation for National Service under the Learn and Serve America: Higher Education grant program. This organization (www.nationalservice.org) frequently pairs with state consortiums to provide pedagogical and financial resources for educators implementing service leaning in their teaching. The course was designed with several principles in mind. I wanted students to work with an international population of women in a way that would reinforce particular classroom concepts and would also challenge the students to develop new ideas of global citizenship. Therefore, the service site needed to be carefully selected to connect with the academic experience in a meaningful way and not be viewed as volunteer work "tacked on" to the course (Trudeau 1997), and the service experience needed to be required in order to be an integral part of the course (Barber and Battistoni 1993). The midwestern city of 390,000 residents in which my university is located is 78% white, which, at first glance, would seem to offer few international populations with which to connect. However, its urban character and strong employment opportunities draw many more diverse groups to the city than are seen in the surrounding rural areas. Almost 10% of the residents self-identify as Hispanic or Latino, many of them first- or second-generation, and a rapidly growing community of war refugees from southern Sudan numbers upwards of 5000 people (US Census 2000).

A local relief agency, the Southern Sudan Community Association, ultimately connected me with my educational partner, an ESL community bilingual liaison for the city public school district. Together with the cooperation of school administrators, we designed a program for the class to tutor/mentor young high school women after school each week for 2 hours. This consisted of both helping them with their schoolwork and engaging them in conversation about their lives in Sudan, the refugee camps where many of them lived in Kenya, and in the United States. We went to the service site as a class (which included myself and my Sudanese counterpart) each week, which both facilitated the closeness of the group and alleviated many language problems (the young women we worked with all spoke Nuer as their first language). While there is some debate in the service-learning literature about faculty responsibility to participate in the service (Barber and Battistoni 1993, 238), the sensitivity of some of the gender issues to be discussed convinced me my presence might be important.

The course, Gender and Global Politics, examines to what extent women participate in and benefit from the decisions that shape the political and economic world. The emphasis is on critically assessing the role of women in political society, and to that end, the case study of Sudan was carefully integrated into the course. Two weeks' readings and discussion early in the semester were specifically designed to familiarize students with the civil war in Sudan and its consequences, especially the flight of refugees from southern Sudan. The young women we worked with had all lived for some time in refugee camps in Africa before gaining refugee visas to the United States. By getting to know the high school students and their individual circumstances, they gained a sophisticated perspective of the workings of the international refugee system and the difficulties refugees face, even once they escape the civil strife of their own countries. To further link the service to the course curriculum, each subsequent week's curriculum was also connected to the Sudanese case study. Several course themes were enhanced by the addition of the service component.

Ethnic and Religious Conflict

Though course readings and discussion addressed ethnic identity and conflict, the service experience brought these issues to light in a tangible way. The Sudanese students we worked with were all non-Muslims from southern Sudan fleeing the northern Muslim government. The world's longest-running civil war has raged in that country intermittently for 4 decades, with an estimated 2 million deaths over the past decade from war-related causes and famine, and millions of others displaced from their homes. Religion is a major factor because of the Islamic fundamentalist agenda of the government, dominated by the mostly Muslim/Arab north (70% of the population). South Sudan (30% of the population), which is Christian and animist, rejects the Islamization of the country and favors a secular arrangement. Political opponents are viewed as anti-Islam and the civil war in southern Sudan is considered a jihad or holy war. Through the government plan of "forced acculturation," thousands of children are abducted and either forcibly converted to Islam, or face torture (Dagne 2002). According to human rights groups and the U.S. State Department, Islamic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) deny food and assistance to non-Muslims who refuse to convert to Islam.

Social and Economic Power

Social and economic disparities are major contributing factors to the Sudanese conflict. Large oil reserves were discovered in the Upper Nile region of southern Sudan in the 1980s, and the government has earned an estimated $500 million annually from oil since it began exporting it in 1999. The economic resources of the country are not shared with southern Sudan. Civilians there are routinely attacked and either dislocated, enslaved, or "acculturated." Christian Aid, a British-based NGO, blames foreign companies for assisting the government of Sudan's war effort by helping to build the oil industry through finance, technical expertise, and supplies (Christian Aid 2001).

The class curriculum focuses on the gendered division of power in the world, with men and women treated unequally in the international system (Peterson and Runyan 1999, 113). Students were able to see first-hand experiences of that concept in the Sudanese women they mentored. Female Sudanese well outnumbered male students in the two school district-wide programs targeted to non-English speaking immigrants. While having had some English in the refugee camps, the women were academically much further behind their age cohort than the men, due to the domestic pressures, including early marriages and family expectations they experienced. One young woman only attended two tutor/mentor sessions with us, as she took a shift in one of the local meatpacking plants which began immediately after school until late at night. Her husband could then look after their infant following his own workday. In their journals, the university students often commented on their surprise at the social and economic pressures the Sudanese women faced at such a young age.

Global Interdependence

The service project provided the students with concrete examples of global interdependence. State borders and sovereignty are often shifting targets, as we learned from our readings. Through their service, students experienced how political and economic conflicts in one state have consequences for other states. Some 4 million Sudanese nationals are internally displaced in Sudan, another 500,000 live as refugees and asylum seekers outside Sudan. The Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya alone houses about 84,000 refugees, most of them from Sudan. But because it is funded by donations from UN member countries, which have fallen in recent years, services and living conditions have also fallen dramatically. While the United States resettled about 69,000 refugees in 2000, rates of asylum approval vary widely by country. While the largest number of applications came from Mexican nationals, their approval rate was only about 7%. Roughly 72-76% of Sudanese asylum applications are approved by the INS, given the crisis in that state (Country Report 2002). In another example of global interdependence, very recent Sudanese cooperation with the United States'-led "war on terror" could have tangible humanitarian assistance rewards (Fisher-Thompson 2003).

Advancing Global Civic Education

This course project had great value in getting students to step outside of their own experiences and realize their responsibility to be good global citizens. Many of the students noted how their stereotypes of refugees had been changed through the service project. They didn't expect refugees to be avid students, willing to endure the difficult scholastic, economic and social hardship to succeed in American society. A number of students told how they became more aware of the consequences of international politics for individual lives. The students were continually touched at the generosity and dedication of the young Sudanese women, and responded with their own kindness. Upon discovering a group of the refugees walked home after quite a distance to a common apartment complex, several of my students took it upon themselves to drive the women home after our tutoring meetings. Some of them also took it upon themselves to connect one of the Sudanese women to a local dental school's clinic for discount dental work on a cavity. The university students were also much more respectful of the refugees than I had anticipated at the outset of the course. They were reluctant, for example, to approach the topic of female genital mutilation in discussion with the women, fearing they might offend or bring trauma to them.

Assessment and Future Considerations

In order to assess the instructive importance of the service learning, a combination of assessment techniques were used. Three reaction papers were assigned, in which students responded to international issues covered in course materials and drew upon their service experiences. They were asked a) how gender shapes one's vision of the world; b) how gender affects war and vice versa; and c) what should be the focus of an international agenda on gender? In all cases, their essays were richly grounded in experiences they had with the refugees. The refugees' direct and indirect responses to the discussions of these and other issues had given the students real-life examples to draw upon in their discussions.

According to Campus Compact, community service needs to be linked to academic study through structured reflection (Rama and Battistoni 1997). Thus, another gauge of the relevance of the experience came from service learning journals the students were required to keep. Their reflections showed the evolution of their thinking on international issues of gender. In almost all cases, early journal entries were purely descriptive, reflecting a sense of awkwardness and apprehension about the service component. This tentativeness quickly gave way to a sense of interest and lively discussion about the lives of the refugee women and their relevance to issues covered in the curriculum. I used student comments on the course evaluations to assess the service learning component. Eighty percent of the class rated the service as the best element of the course, and many of those explicitly mentioned it had elucidated the reading materials in a concrete way. "I never would have expected to find community service so relevant to a college class," wrote one student. Another mentioned the course had confirmed her desire to enter a public health graduate program focused on international health issues. Knowing I would not see these comments until well after the course was over, I believe they gave honest assessments of the experience.

Even with the success of the course, there are several areas that could be improved. First, I would like to have a more targeted assessment tool than the standard course evaluation questions, preferably one that could be used across other service-learning courses and across time. Specific questions need to be asked about how much time is appropriate to spend per week on service, what would help students feel more prepared for the experience, etc. Second, I need to better balance the needs of the university students with those of the high school students with whom we partnered. I did not find out enough about the community's goals and needs from the outset. An assessment tool needs to be designed to administer to the refugees to get their feedback on best practices, how to facilitate a comfortable environment, and how to best meet their needs, I did not give enough guidance to my community partner to take the lead on this, either. My focus was more on my own students, to the disregard sometimes of the best interests of our community partners.

Finally, I continue to be bothered by the lack of continuity of service that occurs once the semester is over. This course is not one that I teach every semester, so it is virtually impossible to maintain an ongoing partnership with the community with any reliability. One way this problem is being addressed at my university is through an interdisciplinary service learning project focused on a single issue, in which faculty are invited to link their courses and plan long-range for the continuity to address the issue. In our case, the issue has been affordable housing in our city. For three semesters now, courses across the disciplines have worked with a handful of community agencies to address the problem. Sociology courses have documented public housing violations and put pressure on public agents to address them. Social work and health courses have raised public awareness of residence-based lead poisoning in our city, and offered public forums and resources to those most likely to be affected. In many cases, data collected by one class have been handed off to a different class to analyze or implement solutions. Although still at an early stage, this approach shows promise to address the continuity problem in a creative way.

References

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Jody Neathery-Castro, University of Nebraska at Omaha 

Neathery-Castro is an assistant professor of political science whose teaching and research agenda includes Francophone politics and interdisciplinary women's studies She thanks Lain Thichuong for collaborating on the course that made this article possible.