Bickford and Reynolds

Bickford, Donna M., and Nedra Reynolds. "Activism and Service Learning: Reframing Volunteerism as Acts of Dissent." Pedagogy 2 (2002): 229-252.

Bickford and Reynolds notice that their service learning students often express enthusiasm for volunteering but a negative, resistant attitude toward activism. They wonder what the causes and implications of this trend might be. They critique the ASL literature as well as practices for not emphasizing two specific kinds of context: history and geography: "too often infused with the volunteer ethos...that ignores the structural reasons to help others" (230).

They mean to theorize activism as a complementary pedagogy/practice to ASL. In ASL "relationships are clearly based on difference" (237)--us and them, university and agency, but move toward a difference-erasing community-unity. "Activism argues for relationships based on connection" (237): grassroots organizing where various agents agitate for an issue, "a shared goal of creating social change" (237), but acknowledges that difference matters.

Change student anti-activism perception by teaching the history of consciousness-raising (eg, feminism) and organizing (Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, everyday struggles). Get students engaged critically with the politics of space and place via critical methodologies like mapping neighborhoods and even just the campus. They want to "...keep the emphasis of their work on the structural formations of communities rather on their individual members" (243). Give students choice in determining projects--even if they choose acts of dissent in support of causes we despise.

Some thoughts: At what point does place-based pedagogy become de-humanized? I wonder this about Reynolds other work too--while I'm drawn to the materiality of place, I want to revise this into a person-in-place pedagogy. Kind of like a text-in-context pedagogy. That person-in-place model (Loeb is useful here) seems to be the most material rhetoric of all. Does volunteering have an affective component ("happy talk") that activism lacks? After all, activism has an agonistic component (working class) that's at odds with middle-class decorum of higher ed.

Ervin

Ervin, Elizabeth. Public Literacy. Boston: Longman, 2003.

In her 'civic literacy' textbook, Ervin offers a useful, accessible distinction among modes of civic engagement. Volunteering/service="unpaid labor willingly given" (122). Activism transcends service in a number of ways..."concerns itself with injustices rather than problems--that is, things that are unfair as oposed to simply unfortunate" and also..."activism goes to the root of those injustices...while service seeks to help victims of those injustices without necessarily addressing the larger social forces that create their problems" (125). Service often involves meeting basic needs while activism focuses on systemic change: lobbying and such. "Finally, activism needs to be accountable to a constituency, move beyond rants and accusations into the realm of purposeful action, and work with a certain level of efficiency and impact. Otherwise, you are doomed to be a lone crusader toiling away at 'random acts of protest'" (126).

I wonder if Ervin's definitions assume a progressive politics? Many people who "do" service fault individuals, not society, for social problems (some feel the homeless person "fell through the cracks" and missed abundant support systems due to personal deficiency), and for those individuals service is not helping the victim of an injustice but rather helping a deficient person. This is a larger trend in the literature of service learning and critical pedagogy, too, where the scholarship assumes that those with the aforementioned ideology haven't yet achieved critical consciousness. Such individuals are framed as 'not yet converted' and also 'simplistic' and in need of a deeper understanding. The scholarship uses "deeper understanding" euphemistically for "different ideology."