A Feminist Service- Learning Pedagogy for Community Border Crossings
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Educated In Agency: A Feminist Service- Learning Pedagogy for Community Border Crossings Author: Melissa Kesler Gilbert Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/1814 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2010 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. ! Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Science Department of Sociology EDUCATED IN AGENCY: A FEMINIST SERVICE-LEARNING PEDAGOGY FOR COMMUNITY BORDER CROSSINGS A Dissertation by MELISSA KESLER GILBERT Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2010 ! ! © MELISSA KESLER GILBERT 2010 ! ! EDUCATED IN AGENCY: A FEMINIST SERVICE-LEARNING PEDAGOGY FOR COMMUNITY BORDER CROSSINGS Melissa Kesler Gilbert Chair: Sharlene Hesse-Biber ABSTRACT Service-learning is an experiential form of education that moves students outside of the walls of academe to meet community-identified needs through the application and renegotiation of a set of theoretical and methodological skills. It is simultaneously a teaching strategy, an epistemological framework, and an educational reform movement. This research takes the form of multi-methodological case studies of service- learning classrooms and service-learning partnerships, examining the translation of feminist pedagogy to the service-learning experience. The voices of students, faculty, pioneers, administrators, and community partners articulate the common and uncommon struggles of teaching a new generation of students to learn and serve in agencies while simultaneously recognizing their own capacity for agency. This work provides evidence that applying feminist pedagogical principles to service-learning initiatives creates more meaningful transformations for our students, faculty, and communities. The interdependent Feminist Service-Learning Process posited here is an innovative framework for moving our students across the civic borders necessary for community engagement. ! ! Educated in Agency: A Feminist Service-Learning Pedagogy for Community Border Crossings TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: Introduction . 1 • Conversations at the Hyphen • Feminist Pedagogy: The Academic Arm of the Women’s Movement • Educated in Agency • From Struggles, Voices Rise: A Methodological Journey Part One: Student Voices CHAPTER TWO: Transforming the Classroom . 39 • Sharing the Responsibility of Learning • Collaborative Learning: The Group Process • The Supermom Contest • The Slumber Party • Kitchen Talk • Student-Identified Risks in Role Playing • Coming to Grips with Subtle Sexism CHAPTER THREE: Letting Feminist Knowledge Serve the City . 69 • Letting Knowledge Serve the City • Women’s Studies • Our Project • Identifying Personal and Political Connections • Building Community in the Classroom • Moving Beyond the Comfort Zone Conclusion: On My Own—Becoming a Feminist CHAPTER FOUR: Educated in Agency . 104 • Personal Identities of Sameness and Difference • Collective Identities • Activist (and Sometimes Feminist) Identities • Conclusion: Community Identities Part Two: Faculty Voices CHAPTER FIVE: Snapped Out of the Norm: Faculty Voices in Service-Learning . 166 • Faculty Voices • Completing the Circle of Learning: Encouraging Pedagogical Transformation Sharing a Common Vision: Developing Community Partnerships • A Thoughtful Space: Building Scholarly Service-Learning Communities • The Camel’s Nose: Creating Sustainable Service-Learning on Campus • Discussion "! ! ! Part Three: Community Voices CHAPTER SIX: Urban Partners in Conversation . 210 • The Activist and the Academy: A History of Community-University Collaboration • The Capstone Partnership • Principles of Feminist Community Partnering • Personal Journeys Toward Connection CHAPTER SEVEN: Cultivating Interdependent Partnerships . 254 • Toward and Interdependent Partnership Paradigm • Common Fate • Common Responsibility • Common Spaces • Carrying the Conversation Forward Part Four: Models for the Future CHAPTER EIGHT: Border Crossings and the Need to Stretch . 290 • Border Crossings • A New Model for Exemplary Feminist Service-Learning Course Design • Integrating the Journey: Student, Faculty, and Community • Next Steps on the Journey: Methodological and Pedagogical APPENDICES . 328 A. GirlPower Journal Writing B. Faculty Interview Guide C. Student Focus Group Protocol D. Faculty Focus Group Protocol E. Community Partner Focus Group Protocol F. Pioneer Focus Group Protocol G. Community Partner Service-Learning Survey H. GCGS Community Partner Survey I. GCGS Student Survey J. GCGS Faculty Survey K. Reflective Strategies L. Women’s Community Education Project Syllabus (2000) M. Women’s Studies 110 Syllabus (2010) ""! ! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The journey toward this dissertation began when I was in the sixth grade and my English teacher asked us all to write down what changes we wanted to see in the world and send them to our local newspaper. It was 1973 and women’s liberation was very much a part of my growing up in suburban Ohio. I wrote to the editor of the Columbus Dispatch, “Women should be able to work on the streets like men.” I believe that was the first glimpse of a feminist consciousness that would shape my academic journey from that point forward. I’m not sure from where my feminist lens emerged, but I imagine it had something to do with Mary Joan, my brilliant mother who always encouraged me to move beyond the traditional contours of life to explore and imagine a different world for women. Feminist work has now taken me inside of the lives of women and girls from across the country, to institutions supporting women’s health and wellness and collective groups educating girls, empowering women, and breaking the silence of growing up female in our society. When I made the decision to move my feminism to higher education and pursue my first graduate program at the University of Baltimore, I met my first feminist mentor, Niki Benokraitis. She cultivated my passion for feminist research and illuminated a collective process for collaborative scholarship. The first essay in this work, where I explore a pedagogy for """! ! ! teaching about subtle sexism, was inspired and invited into the literature by Niki. Later, as a doctoral student, I was fortunate at Boston College to discover a group of women faculty members who would help me to shape a doctoral program of my own that focused on feminist scholarship across the disciplines. Lorraine Liscio brought me into her women’s studies 101 classroom as a teaching assistant where I would meet a group of eager young women, like Anne Tropeano, ready to become feminist thinkers. Feminist historican Carol Hurd Green introduced me to women writers and the concept of border crossings that is central to this work. Mary Daly inspired me to recognize the intersectionality of feminist thought and the importance of reflective writing in the presence of our feline familiars. With my advisor, Sharlene Hesse-Biber, these women built a critical space at Boston College for my feminist scholarship. It was also at BC that I took a course on qualitative research methods with David Karp. He was then, and continues to be, a pensive and encouraging mentor who challenges me to always ask “how is feminism different than any other lens?” When my academic teaching career took me to the Women’s Studies Department at Portland State University, I was lucky to have landed at an institution where my feminist activism, teaching, and scholarship became inevitably joined in the innovative pedagogy of service-learning so valued in that urban teaching environment. My students at PSU, Sally Eck, Kristen "#! ! ! Christophersen, and Carol Holdt were partners in designing service-learning experiences that would shape the feminist classrooms that became the basis for the ethnography that grounds the first several chapters of this dissertation. Each of these students worked with me on the analysis of hundreds of journal entries, co-wrote pieces of our narratives, and helped to imagine the STRETCH model. I always think of Sally when I speak about the model, because she described the process as wading in a rambling creek. For her, the pieces of the model that are posited later in this dissertation, were like the stepping stones that helped a student navigate themselves across the creek when the water was choppy, the creek too deep, or the current too swift. Sally, Carol, and Kristen shaped the student voices that appear in this work through their imaginative reflections on their own journeys. The faculty insights that emerge in this work come from over ten years of facilitating service-learning workshops for colleagues at institutions across the country. I have DeVorah Leiberman, formerly at PSU, Jamie Birge, formerly at Pennsylvania Campus Compact, and Dick Kinsley, from Ohio Campus Compact to thank for setting me on the faculty development path, for each of them recognized the importance of sharing the innovations of service-learning with our colleagues. Jamie was the impetus behind the faculty interviews that ground the work in Chapter Five and has since been a champion of faculty involvement in the movement across the country. #! ! ! The work on community partnership development began as a series of conversations with one of my partners in Portland, Catherine Sameh. Catherine illuminated for me the importance of community voices in service- learning as we worked together on over ten different projects and collaborated