Challenging Privileged Paradigms through Service-Learning: Exposing Dominant Ideology, Unlearning Deficit Thinking, and Debunking the Myth of Meritocracy

This chapter chronicles how one social science course on poverty was structured to mitigate negative effects on both the learner and community members with whom students engaged. The course was taught at a mid-sized, private research university. While the course was designed for sociology majors, it had an interdisciplinary flavor and non-majors often enrolled for elective credit. Students who participated in the course largely reflected university demographics: 86% white and 56% women. With an annual tuition that exceeded $42,000, a majority of the students also came from middle and upper class backgrounds. Thus, students in the course were largely privileged by class and often by race. This chapter describes the course goals, theoretical framework, and student learning in a college level course about poverty. Included is a successful theoretical framework around which educators in a host of disciplines can structure service-learning courses. The framework provides a foundation that does not reinforce oppressive ideologies about marginalized cultural groups and is especially helpful when students from privileged groups engage in service-learning. This chapter is born out of the tensions between the benefits of learning about poverty through community work and the potential for service-learning experiences to reinforce stereotypes about people living in poverty. Throughout this chapter, student comments are used to reveal the ways learners engaged in deep reflection about poverty and the related stereotypes.