Educating students for social justice in service learning

College students often perform service learning projects in communities where race and class differences are profound. Consequently, students must be prepared to understand the context of their service in the socio-political dimensions of social justice. By social justice I refer to intentional steps that move society in the direction of equality, support for diversity, economic justice, participatory democracy, environmental harmony, and resolution of conflicts nonviolently (Lakey, Lakey, Napier, & Robinson, 1995). Cultural dexterity, which is characterized by empathetic connections to groups other than one's own, is necessary for students to develop understanding and affinity with communities they serve (Overton-Adkins, 1997). This article will explore the use of experiential learning activities in the classroom to prepare students to serve as culturally dexterous leaders.

I will use examples from a course I taught recently at Hampshire College, called "Women, Leadership, and Social Change," to illuminate how experiential education exercises can be used to inform students about race, class, and gender issues in their service learning projects. The purpose of the "Women, Leadership, and Social Change" course was to examine how women can be involved in socially just leadership practiced in a number of settings. Student service learning projects, which were used as a context for learning about leadership and social change, included creating an outdoor adventure-based role model project for young girls, working in a battered women's shelter, organizing a human rights campaign, designing a women's leadership program, educating about relationship violence, and developing an environmental education curriculum for children. In addition, several class service projects allowed students and teachers to work as a community for a common goal. One project involved raking leaves, sorting donated clothes, and removing trash at a local battered women's shelter; the other involved performing needed tasks for an elderly couple who, as life-long "war tax" refusers, live at a subsistence level. Since service learning combines theory and practice in academics and in the community, coupled with guided reflection and application, these projects served as a vital part of the curriculum to examine social justice issues.

Critical Thinking Skills and Moral Development

It is difficult to use service learning without an awareness of social justice issues. The educator's obligation to articulate and explore the attendant social ramifications is essential to the students' total understanding of their service learning experience. The refinement of critical thinking skills and the development of what Rhoads (1998) calls the caring self, "a socially oriented sense of self founded on an ethic of care and a commitment to the social good" (p. 283), are foundations of service learning with an attention to social justice.

Since socially just service learning is enhanced when students gain effective critical thinking skills, the focus of the service learning program will determine how successful it is in building critical thinkers. Levison (1990) distinguishes between service learning programs offering exposure, which give students encounters with people less fortunate than themselves, and those promoting engagement, where "students understand intellectually the `broad social dynamics' underlying the situations of the people they serve (the plight of the elderly, the causes of poverty, racism, etc.)" (p. 69).

In addition to introducing skills in critical thinking, service learning has proven a valuable "real world" engagement in experiences that enhance moral development (Ehrlich, 1997; Kendall & Associates, 1990; Kraft, 1992). Abstract moral dilemmas become less dogmatic in the day-to-day experience in social institutions. Students are better able to understand why social change is slow, complex, and cumbersome when they compare their theories and cultural assumptions to reality. A primary benefit is the students' ability to see how much their lives compare with the experiences of people they serve. In an experiential encounter with homelessness, students realize how much homeless people are like themselves or their families. They often recognize the flimsy social safety net that separates them from homelessness.

Another benefit of service learning is that it can enhance a student's commitment to social justice. One study showed that "student participants [in service learning] were much more likely than non-participants to strengthen their commitment to the following life goals: promoting racial understanding, participating in community action programs, and influencing social values" (Sax & Astin, 1997, p. 28) .

The building of moral character can only be haphazardly attained unless students have a chance to struggle with the foundational social justice issues, however painful and uncomfortable they may be (Wilson, 1997). The angst, confusion, and discomfort that dealing with social justice issues bring forth in students is best mitigated by creating a supportive community of learners who can honestly share feelings, speak from a place of authentic experience, and listen compassionately to others who are different from themselves. Experiential education exercises have proven to be beneficial in establishing a learning community that can explore social justice through service learning (Nessel, 1994).

Creating the Learning Community

The concept of "engaged pedagogy" advanced by the work of writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual, bell hooks, is the first step in setting up a learning community that will aid students to be service learners with attention to social justice (hooks, 1994). hooks separates engaged pedagogy from critical (Freire, 1973) or feminist pedagogy (Shrewsbury, 1987; Warren & Rheingold, 1996) by pointing out that engaged pedagogy emphasizes well-being-meaning that teachers are actively engaged in a process of self-actualization.

As a teacher of a course that has social justice at its very roots, my own self-actualization process included not letting my voice of authority and experience silence the students' voices in struggles to understand how social justice affected them. Experiential education is so important in building an engaged learning community because it puts the students' experiences, rather than the teacher's, at the center of knowledge construction.

Another tenet of engaged pedagogy is the notion of pleasure and excitement in the classroom. As hooks (1994) posits,

Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. (p. 7)

Experiential education activities can bring into the classroom the excitement that hooks calls for. In the "Women, Leadership, and Social Change" course, the creation of an engaged learning community that could honestly address social justice issues meant we needed to build trust, communication, and problem-solving skills. The trust fall progressions and various group initiatives (see Rohnke, 1977; Rohnke, 1984) that we used early in the course for group building also contributed to the students' energy and excitement for working collaboratively throughout our time together.

An example of a communication exercise we used was the "product packaging design" game. In this activity, the group is divided into two teams, leaders and followers, who are isolated from each other. The objective is for the followers to construct within 30 minutes a successful package for an egg that allows it to be dropped from an eight-foot height without cracking, using only the directions from the leaders. The followers are given one raw egg, 30 inches of tape, and 20 straws. The followers must only follow the instructions given by the leaders (they may not act on their own), and those instructions are sent by one group's messenger to the other group's messenger. Followers must only respond to leaders' specific questions. They cannot offer additional information about the situation or the materials they have.

Naturally, this exercise brings up the many challenges in communication styles. One outcome in the course was to discuss the different kinds of "talk" used by different racial groups (Delpit, 1995) and by women (VanNostrand, 1993). Students could apply lessons learned from the "product packaging design" activity to the task of building good communication in a diverse community.

Attention to Power

An examination of social justice by its very nature must look at issues of power. Looking at diversity alone is not enough to truly examine social justice issues. Diversity often implies different but equal, while social justice education recognizes that some social groups in our society have greater access to social power (Yeskel, 1995). Feminist pedagogy has extensively explored power as a factor in educational settings (Warren & Rheingold, 1996); it is critical to extend this analysis to the service communities students will interact with later in the course.

An experiential exercise from the Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1992, p. 150) was instrumental in giving students a greater understanding of how social power dynamics come into play in their service learning projects. "The great game of power" starts with all participants stationed outside the classroom. Several students are asked to volunteer to arrange a table and several chairs, which have been positioned randomly in the classroom, so that they will be able to take a position of absolute power in relation to the furniture. Other students are allowed into the classroom one at a time with the directions to take up the most powerful position relative to those already in the room. As each student enters the space, his or her task is to take away the power the people before them have established. Students are not allowed to move anything and must freeze in their position of power until the activity is finished. The game is processed by asking the group who they believe has the most power and why. Individual students can also explain why they thought their assumed position was powerful and who they imagined they were in their "powerful" positions.

Some students find that they are dismayed by the competition of the game and intentionally assume very vulnerable, humble, or powerless positions. Their adversity to assuming power can be discussed in context of people they will encounter in their service learning projects who have been relegated to a subservient position. Through the experience of this activity students could begin to understand why, for example, some battered women give in to an institutional system that continues to re-victimize them.

Class Issues in Service Learning

As many of the service learning experiences students encounter are imbued with issues of socio-economic class, it makes sense for students to examine these issues prior to their work in the community. I have seen profound instances of middle- or owningclass students experiencing extreme culture shock and ineffectiveness in the poor communities they serve. I have also seen raised working-class students struggle with their experience in agencies where class conflict between privileged philanthropic leaders and their poor or working-class constituents is ignored.

Class differences have been disguised in most educational situations, and modes of interaction in education are based on middle-class values (hooks, 1994); therefore, interrogating class issues through experiential education brings the possibility of dialogue and some resolution. I used an activity called "The Race," which I adapted to focus on class issues (see Table 1) in the "Women, Leadership, and Social Change" course to generate dialogue between students of different class backgrounds. In "The Race," students start together to "race" toward a designated point. They take a step forward or backward based on the attribute or condition that is read. Some students end up moving backward while others move consistently forward toward the goal.

This was an extremely powerful exercise for students in my class and was the initiator of some very heartfelt conversation in the group. Part of the reason for the quality of discussion is that students rarely are able to talk about class issues in a facilitated way that moves beyond an economic analysis to draw on the personal/feeling side. An understanding that class is not merely about materialism, but about deeply held values of status and power, is generated from this exercise.

Another class issue students must confront in participating in service learning is the politics of volunteerism. In the United States, the combined wealth of the top 1% of families is more than that of 90% of the remaining American families. In order for this unequal distribution of wealth to be held in place, there is a tremendous need for low-paid and unpaid labor, labor that is often done by women and people of color (Pharr, 1996).

In order for this top-heavy system of economic inequity to maintain itself, the 90% on the bottom must keep supplying cheap labor. A very complex, intricate system of institutionalized oppressions is necessary to maintain the status quo so that the vast majority will not demand its fair share of wealth and resources and bring the system down (Pharr, 1988, p. 11).

So when students volunteer in shelters or soup kitchens, they are ultimately supporting the informal economy of volunteerism that subsidizes the unequal accumulation of wealth. An experiential exercise I have used to stimulate discussion about volunteerism and class issues is the "Wealth Distribution Activity."1 In this activity, ten chairs are lined up next to each other with ten participants each occupying a chair. One person is designated to represent the wealthiest group, the other nine represent the rest of the US population. Participants are asked to occupy chairs according to the progression of accumulated wealth (the sum of cash, real estate, stocks, bonds, art, personal property) by families since 1976.

In 1976, the top 10% owned half of total nation's wealth. The one person designed as representing the richest group takes over five chairs, the nine others crowd on the five remaining chairs. Today, the top 10% owns 70% of all private wealth. Furthermore, the top 1% controls more than 40% of the wealth in the United States, more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. One person stretches across seven chairs, the nine others struggle to occupy the three remaining chairs. If the arm of the "rich" person represents the wealthiest 1%, that person's arm should stretch out over four chairs, one more chair than the entire bottom 90% occupy.

The wealth distribution exercise works well as a lead-in to talk about volunteerism. It is not intended to discourage students from volunteering, but for them to consider critiques of service learning (see Illich, 1990) situated vis-a-vis its benefits and to point out the difference between tenuous social services in our society and sustainable social change.

Social Service or Social Change?

When undertaken with a lens on social justice, service learning can introduce students to the distinction between social service and social change. The goal of social service is to provide immediate help to those in need, while social change work focuses additionally on changing the societal, political, and cultural barriers that hold the need for social services in place. Social inequality demands the continued reliance on social service solutions.

I once believed that community service projects should have a distinct ending so students could see a concrete result and feel good about what they had done. Now I believe that service as part of a continuation of work already begun is also important. Students need to know that social change is not so easily packaged into finite clumps of accomplishment. They can participate in an ongoing project where the end is not apparent, and then teacher-guided reflection can include discussion about the frustrations and institutional barriers involved in creating change.

Sigmon (1990) describes principles of service learning that relate to the experience of learners and facilitators in the "Women, Leadership, and Social Change" course. The first principle is that "those being served control the service provided" (pg. 57). Students in my class, after intense discussions about the purpose of service in a battered women's shelter, arrived at the conclusion that our actions must be determined by the needs of the organization, however unglamorous, routine, and mundane they might be. As one student noted, making an impact in grassroots not-for-profit organizations is more about licking stamps than about direct service to individuals.

Gender Issues in Service Learning

The use of experiential activities is particularly effective in groups of women who have typically been expected to be passive in educational settings (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Van Nostrand (1993) points out that females have been socialized to defer to others and to diagnose dysfunctional actions of others when in groups. The engagement that happens in experiential education encourages women to move beyond diagnosing problematic process to build the leadership and social change skills that will benefit them in service learning. In fact, Sax and Astin (1997) found that women are more predisposed to service learning than men.

Another central question addressed in the course was how women are constrained from becoming agents of social change by their traditional role in care of civil society rather than in care of the state. If women are expected to expend their energy in caring for the downtrodden, how can they have intensity left to engage in the political and social public arenas where profound social change can occur? Many women struggle to work for social change without being overwhelmed by despair.

In the "Women, Leadership, & Social Change" course, we used a hope-and-despair ritual to experientially address this perplexing dilemma. This intense group circle is modeled after the work of Joanna Macy (1983). After a sacred space is invoked, participants are directed to spontaneously voice their despairs about what they experience in service work and then "throw" them into the center of the circle. After the "pile" of despairs has grown quite large, students sit in silence to acknowledge and honor the existence of despair in this work. They imagine surrounding the "pile" with light and eventually hope. Then a candle is passed around the circle, with the receiving students, if they desire, voicing their hopes about the service work. The value of experientially acknowledging despair is vital in working with women's groups as the challenges must be acknowledged with the same attention given to recognizing successes.

Race Issues in Service Learning

The national discussions on race generated by such events as the Los Angeles riots, the Thomas-Hill ,hearings, the burning of black churches, the attack on bilingual education, and the Million Man March are serious indicators that race matters to our students (West, 1994). The issues brought up by racial inequality pervade service learning work and must be addressed.

The use of cross-cultural simulations can expose students to some of the feelings that arise when they encounter racial or ethnic differences in their service work. Examples of cross-cultural simulations are "BaFa BaFa," a game that forces interaction between two made-up cultures with characteristics that clash, and "Barnga," a card game where the participants are unaware that the rules are different for each group until they change groups and experience culture shock. In my class, we used an adaptation of "BaFa BaFa" where, for example, one cultural group communicated quietly with eyes averted, while the other was boisterous and physical. Other simulated cultural differences involving mannerisms, social distance, communication, dress, work and play habits, esteem for elders or group members of a particular sex, and treatment of strangers can also be used to illustrate the challenges of interacting with people who are different from us. Discussion that follows this activity can bring up strategies for working with racial and ethnic differences that arise in students' service projects, while also emphasizing that some races or cultures hold more social power than others.

In examining racial issues, students need to be made aware of how white privilege can subtly, and often unintentionally, impact the work white students do in communities of color. I use Peggy McIntosh's (1988) list of white privileges as a basis for an exercise in which students volunteer ahead of time to stand and read one of McIntosh's privileges. Examples include "I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race" (p. 6), "I can choose bandages in `flesh color' and have them more or less match my skin" (p. 9), "I can turn on the television or open the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented" (p. 5), "I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race" (p. 7). I then have students create and read statements of white privilege that are specific to their own service learning projects. For instance, in a project involving outdoor adventure, declarations such as "I can hike in the woods and know that the people I encounter will probably be of my race" or "I can open an outdoor magazine and see my race widely represented" may be examples. The students' clear voice of white privilege that rings out with these declarations encourages poignant reflection for all involved.

Conclusion

There is still much to be learned about exploring social justice in situations using service learning. Educators must be actively engaged in examining their own biases and identifying misinformation they receive.

The complexity of including social justice issues in the curriculum requires a caution about using experiential education. It is critical that activities are not simply substituted for self-reflection, critical analysis, and dialogue. Of course, the vital lessons in social justice will be learned in the service projects themselves; the experiential activities outlined here are ways to access and reflect on feelings and knowledge generated by the students' engagement in service. When used with sensitivity, courage, and compassion, experiential education offers a powerful tool in the journey toward justice.

Notes

This activity is adapted from one developed by United For a Fair Economy and outlined by Felice Yeskel and Betsy Leondar-Wright (1997) in Adams, Bell, and Griffin's Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice.

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Karen Warren is an instructor in the Outdoors Program/Recreational Athletics at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002 USA (kwCC@hamp.hampshire .edu . She is also working on a Ph.D. in Experiential Education and Social Justice Issues at the Union Institute.

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