Service-Learning: An Exportable Pedagogy?

 In this chapter, the author contends that service-learning is an educational approach that is historically and culturally bound and is, therefore, limited in its universality. She argues that incorporating service-learning components into study abroad curricula must be carefully planned and implemented if all parties involved are to benefit from the learning and service exchange. She also considers how U.S.-based service-learning has become entangled with another educational reform movement called "civic engagement"-- a movement particularly imbued with western concepts of citizenship and democracy. She examines aspects of the Turkish educational system and its concomitant messages concerning civic behavior in order to consider how such messages may confound easy implementation of the service-learning pedagogy in Turkey. She concludes with a call for service-learning practitioners to conduct more rigorous research to determine where and how the pedagogy can flourish beyond the U.S. and why it may not root successfully in all countries.