Morton

Keith Morton. "The Irony of Service: Charity, Project, and Social Change in Service Learning." Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 2 (1995): 19-32.

Morton rejects the prevailing notion that there exists a continuum of types of service and that faculty need to move students away from volunteerism toward advocacy. Instead, he proposes three distinct paradigms: charity, project, and social change, each having a set of logics and the potential for thin or thick execution, integrity, and depth.

"Most commonly, a service continuum is presented as running from charity to advocacy, from the personal to the political, from individual acts of caring that transcend time and space to collective action on mutual concerns that are grounded in particular places and histories" (20). In the continuum model, charity is painted as "giving of the self" with no concern for "lasting impact" (20). Advocacy, meanwhile, is concerned with change and is more "mature" and "complex" (20). Thus, something to move students toward, as it has greater concern with root causes and investment in relationships (21).

Instead, acknowledge that each has its own logic. We should thus be "challenging and supporting students to enter more deeply into the paradign in which they work; and intentionally exposing students to creative dissonance among the three forms" (21).

Charity's limited in that the work is fragmentary, focuses on deficits, and can create a dependency (21), but positive in that the work is person-centered and spiritually rich (25-26). Project models emphasize community problems and develop plans for solving those problems (21), the limitations being that sometimes there are unforseen consequences, universities are painted as saviors/experts, and can lack flexibility (22) and that the motivator for addressing problems can be a negative emotion like anger (27). Social change models involve collaborative work that reveals and analyzes root causes of injustice and power imbalances (22).

Any of these might be "thin" if "paternalistic" or fails to offer alternatives or "leave people tired and cynical" (28). "Thick" if "grounded in deeply held, internally coherent values; match means and ends, describe a primary way of interpreting and relating to the world; offer a way of defining problems and solutions; and suggest a vision of what a transformed world might look like" (28).