Community engagement graduate students and naive complicity-

Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Open Access Theses Theses and Dissertations 4-2016 Community engagement, graduate students, and "naive complicity": Service in the university Jonathan S Isaac Purdue University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_theses Part of the Higher Education Commons Recommended Citation Isaac, Jonathan S., "Community engagement, graduate students, and "naive complicity": Service in the university" (2016) Open Access Theses 779 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_theses/779 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries Please contact epubs@purdue.edu for additional information Graduate School Form 30 Updated 12/26/2015 PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL Thesis/Dissertation Acceptance This is to certify that the thesis/dissertation prepared By Jonathan Isaac Entitled Community Engagement, Graduate Students, and "Naive Complicity": Service in the University For the degree of Master of Arts Is approved by the final examining committee: Bradley Dilger Chair Jennifer Bay Patricia Sullivan To the best of my knowledge and as understood by the student in the Thesis/Dissertation Agreement, Publication Delay, and Certification Disclaimer (Graduate School Form 32), this thesis/dissertation adheres to the provisions of Purdue University’s “Policy of Integrity in Research” and the use of copyright material Approved by Major Professor(s): Approved by: Bradley Dilger Dr Ryan Schneider Head of the Departmental Graduate Program 04/21/2016 Date i COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, GRADUATE STUDENTS, AND “NAÏVE COMPLICITY”: SERVICE IN THE UNIVERSITY A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Jonathan S Isaac In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts May 2016 Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana ii For my father, always iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to professors Bradley Dilger, Jenny Bay, and Pat Sullivan for their advice and inspiring conversations over the past few months Their support in these last few years has been beyond anything I could have anticipated, and for that, I am grateful Thanks especially to Jenny for being a fantastic service learning guide and mentor in English 680 What I learned in that class had a major impact on what I wrote about here Thanks also to Sam Blackmon, whose class provided the spark that would eventually become this thesis, and to Thomas Rickert, for the fruitful and entertaining conversations in class and in your office Thanks to Carrie Grant, Katie Yankura, and all of the other grad students who have helped me think through some of these ideas And thanks to the best cohort anyone could ask for—Erin, Michelle, Jenny, Jake, Rebekah, Mitch, and Beth The endless Internet memes and Left Shark jokes kept me sane Thanks to my family, who keep me going And thanks to Katie, who keeps me grounded iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES vi ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER THE MANIFOLD TENSIONS OF COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT: A LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 The Origins of Community Engagement in Composition Studies 1.2 Dewey and “Experiential Learning” 14 1.3 Contemporary Criticism of Service Learning 20 1.4 Enacting Community-centric Practices 24 CHAPTER TOWARD A PRACTICE OF SHORT-TERM SERVICE: A CASE STUDY OF A COMMUNITY RESULTS-BASED NON-PROFIT 32 2.1 Community Engagement and Short-Term Academics 32 2.2 Service Practices of a National Non-Profit 36 2.2.1 A vocabulary focused on setting expectations and getting results 39 2.2.2 Intensive near-peer mentoring and coaching 46 2.2.3 Repositioning strategic failures as tactical successes/long-term goals 54 2.2.4 A yearlong commitment to service 60 2.3 Doing the Most Good While Doing the Least Harm 64 CHAPTER TOWARD A PRACTICE OF SHORT-TERM SERVICE: IMPLEMENTATION IN A FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION CLASSROOM 66 3.1 Service Learning and First-Year Composition at Purdue 66 3.2 A Model of Graduate Student-Led Service Learning at Purdue 69 3.2.1 An institutionally sustained campus-community partnership 70 3.2.2 A yearlong partnership 75 v Page 3.2.3 A direct service project model of engagement 77 3.3 Where We Go From Here 81 WORKS CITED 84 vi LIST OF TABLES Table Page Table Comparison of College Possible Coaches and Graduate Student Instructors 37 vii ABSTRACT Isaac, Jonathan S MA, Purdue University, May 2016 Community Engagement, Graduate Students, and “Naïve Complicity”: Service in the University Major Professor: Bradley Dilger This thesis takes issue with current models of community engagement and service learning that not take into consideration the constraints imposed upon graduate students or short-term instructors who teach a service learning course or who undertake community-oriented research Bound up in the long history of academic needs overshadowing or entirely neglecting community concerns, campus-community partnerships involving graduate students are much more likely to maintain, to quote Linda Flower, a “naïve complicity in the social structures that put power and prestige on the university side of the ledger while putting passive need and incapacity on the debit, community side” (105) While looking to approximate the work done by long-time scholars entrenched in their communities, this thesis also looks to the infrastructural model of a non-profit organization, College Possible, whose workforce is made up of recent college graduates and whose infrastructure allows it to get a lot out of these team members in a relatively short amount of time By identifying the organization’s practices that allow it to keep community results and success at the forefront of their practices, and by sharing specific stories that ground these practices in lived experience, this thesis argues for a 78 partnership toward the completion of a task or goal In this way, community needs remain at the fore, yet the short-term nature of the service is taken into account Shannon M Bell and Rebecca Carlson, in Stoecker and Tryon’s collection, indicate that project-based service learning works well because the community organizations “would not have to expend the resources to create something for the service learner to do” (30) In our case, Melissa, who was always looking for ways to connect residents of Westminster Village to the larger Purdue and West Lafayette communities, saw this oral history partnership as yet another way to bridge that divide Further, that there was a clear exigency and a clear benefit for the residents made such a partnership even more attractive In the past, Purdue-Westminster Village relations had operated more along the lines of an expert-client model, where residents were asked to complete surveys or perform tasks that would be studied by university agents with little perceived benefits for themselves (Hidalgo and Leon 44) By reversing the dynamic and offering residents the opportunity to leave the partnership with memories and with a history to pass along, my partnership with Westminster Village more closely approaches the sort of relationships for which Sullivan and Porter advocate: “Caring for participants as individuals, and out of a spirit of concern and commitment, is how we should construct our ethos as researchers” (113) That English 108 students often develop personal relationships with the residents they interview suggests that, rather than removing affect or bias from the partnership, “the caring ethic” becomes an integral part of the partnership (Sullivan and Porter 113) In other words, the relationships fostered by this project inform the students’ perception 79 of the project’s value, as well as their perception of what they themselves take away from the partnership Echo Hidalgo and Leon, Because students developed relationships with their audiences—and they valued the knowledge they learned from them—they cared deeply about the final product They wanted to produce good projects that would be pleasing to their audience, not because they wanted to win them over, but because the relationship itself had value to them In this way, students also cared about the process…[T]he choices students made as composers had consequences outside the classroom for people with whom they had developed bonds (46-7) This is certainly what all service learning practitioners dream of—students wanting to produce good results not for a grade, but because the relationships they’ve developed through the partnership are important to them By combining the direct service model of service learning with the project-based model, this oral history assignment connects the emotionalism associated with the direct service component to the finished results desired by the partner organization College Possible works much the same way—the relationships developed between coaches and students position coaches to go the extra mile not for themselves, but for their students, because “the relationship itself [has] value to them.” In fact, as mentioned earlier, I would argue that the results that College Possible achieves are only possible because of the relationships established between coaches and students Though the relationships between students in English 108 and residents at Westminster Village cannot be labeled “near-peer,” such bonds nevertheless return us to a conversation of the 80 “ethic of care”—and the potential for service learning partnerships to emanate from this ethic—as a valuable centerpiece of such partnerships Without overextending themselves or their students, graduate student instructors can utilize the in-between positioning of a direct service project to replicate College Possible’s vocabulary of expectation and results—and the furthering of a results-based model through emotional buy-in—while avoiding the nebulous model of assessing community impact like in Herzberg’s servicebased course While it is unrealistic and exploitative to expect service learners to commit 60-70 hours a week to their service partnership, as College Possible does, a direct service project like my own with Westminster Village is nevertheless able to foreground the expectations of the project and emphasize the tangible results that arise because of the partnership by developing a relationship grounded in emotional connections and a “shared possible goal”—a goal that is attuned to both resident needs and curricular aims (Martin et al 65) Further, by structuring such a direct service project around community issues, graduate student instructors can approximate Hidayat et al.’s vision regarding campus-community partnerships, though more kairotic projects can and should certainly be devised There are, of course, concerns with such a model The distinct start and end dates may allow students to divorce themselves from the ongoing social issues that necessitate the partnership, as they may see their role as “finished” once the project ends Further, they may not devote themselves wholeheartedly to the project, knowing that it has an expiration date With careful post-project planning and instruction, graduate students can mitigate such concerns by extending the issues that arise as a result of the project into further assignments or units Following the conclusion of the oral history unit, students in 81 my course write white papers that center on issues of aging, memory, and medicine They identify stakeholders in these conversations and advocate for a certain solution to issues that inevitably accompany the aging process in America In this way, they remain tapped in to the sorts of conversations that we have in class and that they witness firsthand at the retirement community; they are able to bring some of their concerns or reflections to bear in a legitimate way that nevertheless keeps them invested in the issues of aging Likewise, on the final day of the semester, my students research and present on service organizations that they can apply to serve with post-college Though the idea of and dangers in service are ongoing and ever-present conversations throughout our semester, this culminating activity reminds students that the opportunities to engage with their communities not cease upon graduation 3.3 Where We Go From Here Community engagement in higher education is not going away anytime soon In fact, an uptick in scholarship and institutional spaces devoted to community engagement suggest that it will only grow, as colleges become more concerned with providing “realworld” applications to learning and producing engaged, career-ready students By focusing on service learning partnerships led by graduate students and other short-term instructors—a not-insignificant portion of the population of service learning instructors— we can arrive at a more fully-formed understanding of the complex interplay of community partners and university representatives Current literature largely focuses on partnerships coordinated with tenure-track or full-time faculty, a reality that obscures the constraints of labor and longevity imposed upon graduate students who also want to undertake service learning or community engagement 82 One way to begin thinking about graduate students and community engagement is to focus not on graduate students’ motivations, but rather the institutional models (or lack of models) that support these students as they undertake such work Looking across higher education institutions, we may be able to track the positioning of community issues in these models and the sorts of projects or relationships that such models produce At Purdue, the model supports sustaining partnerships and passing them on from one instructor to the next, though there are certainly exceptions to this model A study that traces the mentorship of graduate students across the partnerships that these students ultimately undertake would allow us a glimpse into the impact of institutional mentorship on the practices of service learning instructors We also need to keep in mind the way that community organizations are written into or written out of the model of graduate student engagement Most service learning scholarship, including this chapter, does not offer much, if any, commentary from the community partners themselves Involving them in the process of graduate student-led community engagement would allow them to offer feedback from the other side of the aisle Indeed, by involving community partners in the conversation, we may begin to better understand the benefits and drawbacks to short-term service from their perspective While Stoecker and Tryon’s collection begins this conversation, more work can be done regarding issues of graduate student labor and resources Lastly, we need to continue striving to use our resources and cultural capital for good, and we need to remain reflexive regarding the ways in which community engagement that involves university agents often maintains a “naïve complicity” in the structures of power that encourage learned helplessness by community members Indeed, 83 such complicity is easily obscured by the rewards system inherent to higher education, which often acknowledges publications and grants awarded but does not recognize work that addresses community concerns While some universities have begun reexamining and rewriting tenure guidelines to account for this move toward community engagement, many still trail behind There is still room to grow And while the tide is turning on community engagement and issues of reciprocity, more can always be done WORKS CITED 84 WORKS CITED “About.” College Possible College Possible Web 20 January 2016 Adelman, Clem “Kurt Lewin and the Origins of Action Research.” Educational Action Research 1.1 (1993): 7-24 Print Adler-Kassner, Linda The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2008 Adler-Kassner, Linda, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters, eds Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in 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