Future Directions for Service Learning in Higher Education

The service learning movement has attempted to position itself exactly as a theoretically and pedagogically unproblematic practice to be embedded within higher education. However, the center will not hold. For the academy is by its very nature a space for examination and critique, especially when confronted with issues as complex and contested as what transpires within and across communities. It is thus incumbent on the service learning field to carefully and critically examine its own practices and theories in order to strengthen them rather than have them picked apart by not-so-gentle critics.

If this is so, if we are to begin to think carefully and critically and differently about service learning, if we are "not to think the same thing as before," then I would argue (with Foucault) that we must experiment. We must experiment with what service learning could be: service learning without servers; service learning explicitly and self-reflexively focused back upon itself rather than out into the community; service learning as community; service learning as an incremental discipline rather than a revolutionary transformation; service learning without service learning; service learning as science. (author)