Getting Inside the “Underside” of Service-Learning: Student Resistance and Possibilities

Service-learning is often heralded as a pedagogical strategy with “transformative potential” (Jones 2002; Rosenberger 2000). However, as these illustrative quotations from undergraduate students enrolled in our service-learning courses suggest, not all students are immediately, or gracefully, transformed by their experiences. Further, students’ abilities to engage with all aspects of their service-learning courses depend on the intersection of their own sociocultural backgrounds (which become very apparent in community service environments), developmental readiness for such learning to occur, and the privileging conditions that situate college students in community service organizations in the first place (Jones 2002).

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