Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
Fall 1999, pp. 133-137
Book Review
Faith of Our (Service-Learning Mothers and) Fathers:
A Review of Service-Learning: A Movement's Pioneers
Reflect on Its Origins, Practice and Future
Timothy K. Stanton, Dwight E. Giles, Jr., and Nadinne I. Cruz
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999
For those interested in service-learning - whether
as a novice or experienced faculty practitioner, as a
scholar of higher education or social movements, as
a student, as a community partner, or as an interested observer - this book is a must read. ServiceLearning: A Movement's Pioneers Reflect on Its
Origins, Practice and Future, or simply the
"Pioneers" book as people in service-learning circles refer to it, offers the reader a wealth of insights
and wisdom about service-learning from the people
who initiated this movement in higher education.
The book reviews the history of the movement
through the eyes of its early practitioners, introduces
the challenges faced by early practitioners and their
responses, both personally and programmatically,
and articulates their accumulated wisdom that
informs the debates that the movement still faces
today.
As a now-seasoned service-learning practitioner,
what I find most rewarding in "Pioneers" are the
voices of people I have come to respect articulating
my own passions, frustrations, commitments, and
ambivalences in ways that are simultaneously comforting and challenging. At virtually every servicelearning meeting I have attended over the years, the
conversation often steers toward the frustrations participants experience at their home institutions as a
result of being marginalized, disrespected, or
ignored. In reading of the pioneers' early (and often
continuing) experiences, I find it comforting that
others have been engaged in similar struggles elsewhere, and that I am not alone in this struggle. I find
that I can learn from these seasoned veterans who
know how to win victories in their communities, in
their universities, and with their students. And I find
it reassuring that I am doing something right (and
good) to be confronting these difficulties, and that it
is not simply my own deficiencies that underlie the
challenges I face. At the same time, hearing the pioneers' eloquent formulations of the goals we seek in
the service-learning movement - to transform
higher education, to change power relations in society, and to democratize our political system -
reminds me of the monumental challenges still
before us.
The authors of Service-Learning, Timothy
Stanton, Dwight Giles, and Nadinne Cruz, refer to
the collective vision of social justice transformation
and practice of educators who integrate community
service (broadly defined) into the academic work of
institutions of higher education as a social movement. I believe this to be an appropriate and valuable
approach to understanding the phenomenon of service-learning and have elaborated this social movement framework elsewhere (Marullo, 1996).
However, in saying this, I should point out that the
authors do not present an analytical framework of
the movement's ideology or mobilizing frameworks,
or a systematic review of the organizational forms or
program strategies to achieve the movement's goals
(Lofland, 1996). To be sure, these elements are all
contained in Service-Learning, found in the stories
told by the pioneers, which provide deep insights
into understanding the pioneers' passions for service-learning and visions of social change. What I
find to be weakest in "Pioneers" is the limited systematization done by the authors in presenting the
forms the movement has taken and framing the
debates confronting the movement. The authors
have instead chosen to let the pioneers' own words
speak to these issues. Clearly, this narrative, oral history format achieves the purposes set forth by the
authors:
to give this field, which has shaped and supported us so well over many years, a sense of its
rich, colorful, diverse, and largely unknown origins. In so doing, we hope to stimulate both
individual and collective reflection on this
work, and help pass it on to the next generation
of practitioners. (p. xvi)
Once the decision was made to present the oral
histories of the early leaders of the service-learning
movement, the authors determined a process for
selecting the pioneers to include. The methodology
involved convening a conference of known servicelearning pioneers, hearing their stories, and eliciting
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