How Should We Conduct and Report Service-Learning Research?
Honnet, & Migliore, 1991; Kendall & Associates,
1990; Stanton, 1990). As a philosophy it represents
the values that individuals hold about the role service plays in human and community development. It
is value-laden, and is therefore incongruous with the
value-free goal of positivism.
Besides being value-laden, service-learning is an
"amorphous concept that resists rigid definitions and
universal understanding" (Shumer, 1993a). Service
programs exist in all kinds of settings and for all
kinds of purposes (Giles, Honnet, & Migliore, 1991;
Kendall & Associates, 1990). Incorporating goals
such as civic engagement, academic enhancement,
personal development, and community improvement, service-learning is a complex, multi-faceted
phenomenon that is hard to pin down. Again, service-learning is incongruous with the precision
required by positivism.
The actual activities performed by students, faculty, and community sponsors can vary immensely
from program to program, and even within programs. The nature of the service, reflective activities,
reading and writing assignments, assessment, and
instructional activities, etc. can vary from site to site
and class to class. In addition, faculty and staff exert
little control over the actual service and learning
activities in the community. Hence, the comparability of one student's experience with that of another
is elusive. This variability causes positivistic
research strategies to be incompatible with servicelearning practice.
Selecting a Research Paradigm
for Service-Learning
What kind of research needs to be done on service-learning in the 21st century? As indicated
above, service-learning has a high degree of individual variation, much of which is controlled by neither
the university faculty member nor the student. It is
value-laden, synergistic (Howard, 1998), dynamic,
highly complex (Shumer, 1987), and focused on
social and individual change (Kahne & Westheimer,
1996). Service-learning in higher education also has
a prescribed notion of good practice (Honnet-Porter
& Poulsen, 1989). Exemplary practice involves
many dimensions, including formative and summative assessment, determination of actual community
needs, collaborative efforts between colleges and
communities, mutual learning between students and
community members served, and empowerment of
communities to meet their own needs (Sigmon,
1987)
Acknowledging its variability and idiosyncratic
nature, how do we begin to find appropriate research
paradigms and methods to understand the nature of
service-learning and what it can accomplish? Given
the previous discussion about the characteristics of
research paradigms, it would seem that assumptions
and practice favor non-positivistic studies. Because
service-learning is about context, about values, and
about change, it seems quite logical that research
paradigms that capture these dimensions of human
interaction would be most suitable for the study of
service-learning. Giles and Eyler (1998) suggest we
match the research method to the research question.
I would agree and would further suggest that both
the research question and the research paradigm
match to the nature of the phenomenon studied. For
service-learning research, we might consider the following approaches.
Learning from our Stories
While adhering to a sense of rigor that will ensure
validity, we need to be able to tell, in detail, the story
of service-learning as it plays out in the lives of students, community sponsors, administrators, faculty
and other notable contributors to the process. If we
assume that service-learning is context-driven, and
idiosyncratic to the student, the site, and the program, then we need data and analysis that focuses on
the details of the people and the process. While there
have been a few qualitative studies in higher education that focus on important issues (Eyler, Giles, &
Gray 1999), very few have provided the depth and
long-term coverage to show detailed impact on participants, institutions, and communities.
To illustrate, I borrow an example not from the
service-learning literature, but from national service
studies. Specifically, a study of the Youth*Works
AmeriCorps initiative in Minnesota (Shumer &
Rental, 1998) included a lengthy report on a single
handicapped individual that provided enormous
information and documentation on all aspects of the
service and learning. Actually conducted as a project
in a research course on qualitative methods, a
Master's student followed a woman with Multiple
Sclerosis for a period of five months, meeting with
her weekly, recording everything about her service
experience. The result was a 24 page report on Beth
and her experiences in the AmeriCorps program.
The study documented how she grew and changed,
what she did with her community agency, how her
program director modified the regulations to allow
her to work, how income from AmeriCorps actually
affected her housing situation, and how various
trainings and workshops greatly influenced her
behavior and her ability to create change in both
Minnesota and national policy. This study clearly
showed causal factors and revealed information that
was totally unexpected (and helpful). Despite claims
to the contrary about the lack of professional weight
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