Borderlands Theory in Service-Learning Research: Remapping the Metaphor

Rachael Wendler, University of Arizona rwendler@u.arizona.edu

IARSLCE 2012

The Story Seed

Taylor, J. (2002). Metaphors we serve by: Investigating the conceptual metaphors framing national and

community service and service-learning.

• Conceptual metaphors “structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).

• Service is Citizenship; Service is War; Service is Business

• Taylor’s suggestion: Service is Borderlands

Service-Learning as Borderlands?

Butin, 2005; Chesler, Ford, Galura, & Chareneau, 2011; Delgado Bernal, Aleman & Garavito, 2001; Hayes & Cuban, 1997; Keith, 1998; Taylor, 2002; Williams & Van Cleave, 2011.

Mapping Metaphors

SERVICE-LEARNING IS WARSource: War Target: Service-

LearningSoldiers

StudentsGeneral Teacher

Community Members as Enemy? Fellow Soldiers? Innocent Civilians? Captains?

Mapping Metaphors

SERVICE-LEARNING IS BORDER CROSSINGSource: Borderlands Target: Service-Learning Theory

Border Crossers All Students?

• Psychological, Spiritual, Sexual Borderlands

• Chicana identity and oppression

• Challenges of mediating between home and dominant cultures

• Resisting binaries

• Genre-blurring

“The prohibited and forbidden are its [the Borderlands’] inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (pp. 25-26).

Giroux and McLaren’s Border Pedagogy

“First, the category of border signals a recognition of those epistemological, political, cultural, and social margins that structure the language of history, power, and difference . . . Second, it also speaks to the need to create pedagogical conditions in which students become border crossers in order to understand otherness in its own terms . . . Third, border pedagogy makes visible the historically and socially constructed strengths and limitations of those places and borders we inherit and that frame our discourses and social relations.” (Giroux,1992, p. 28)

C. Alejandra Elenas: Stretching the Borderlands frame to apply to all students “raises the problematic of appropriation and erasure of difference” (1997, para. 30).

Erasure of Difference?

• “…university tutors left campus and entered places in the community and community agencies that they ordinarily would never go” (Hayes & Cuban, 1997, p. 75)

• “Crossing these physical borders…exposed tutors to the effects of poverty and racism on individual lives” (Hayes & Cuban, 1997, p. 75)

• “Challenging students’ prior homogenous experiences, the agencies and sites in which community service learning students work and learn typically serve populations marked by racial and economic disadvantage” (Chesler et al., 2011, p. 342)

Border Students: a fluid category incorporating students who, for reasons such as ethnicity, class, or language, feel the service

site is just as much—or more— home than the university.

Hybrid Identities

Belonging at the Service Site

• Sites are Comfortable: “home away from home” (Lee, 2005, p. 6); “more comfortable at their service sites than on campus” (Green, 2001, p. 25).

• Identification with Clients: “I was once one of them” (Delgado Bernal, Aleman, & Garavito, 2001, p. 575); “I have something in common … with them because [we’re] minorities, most of [us] are from low-income families, and most of them [would be] first generation in college” (Lee, 2005, p. 6).

• Stronger Service (McCollum, 2003; Green, 2001): “There is a sense of validity in what I have to say. I am not pretending to understand, I do understand” (Shadduck-Hernandez, 2006, p. 30).

Not Belonging at Service Site

• Intersectionality: “I knew my advice only ran so deep because of the differences between our lives” (Lee, 2005, p. 6)

• Internalized Racism: “a black woman . . .opened the door . . . I knew she was wondering who I was. If her mind could tell this story, she was probably thinking, ‘Who is this young black girl . . .That’s all it takes, that split second for one member of the black race to doubt the other. I knew this is what she was thinking by her facial expression and how it changed when Elsa’s white face came into view of the doorway, and all of a sudden this 40-year-old woman seemed welcoming.” (Green, 2001, p. 23)

University Affiliation: “One of the classes said, oh, did your parents buy you a BMW for Christmas and are you from New Jersey? I was like, no what, no. . . . I wanted to be, I am just like you I am not your typical Bucknell student . . . . It kind of made me feel like. . . I don't fit in anywhere. Like you see Bucknell students as this, and I am not that.” (Henry, 2005, p. 57)

Not Belonging at the University

• Culture Shock: (Yeh, 2010)• Service as “White”: (Gilbride-Brown, 2011; Coles, 1999)• Curriculum to help privileged students understand privilege:

“This isn’t written for me” (Wendler, 2010).• Exhaustion at Educating Dominant Students: “I do more service

in this class than I ever do at my site” (Mitchell & Donahue, 2009); “Sometimes I get real tired of hearing White people talk about the conditions of Black people” (Tatum, 1992, p. 7); (Chesler et al., 2011).

• Anger: Personal experiences placed in larger context of inequality (Tatum, 1992).

Belonging at the UniversityService-Learning Class as “Safe Space”: (Delgado-Bernal, Aleman, & Garavito, 2001; Gilbride-Brown, 2011; Shadduck-Hernandez, 2006).

Recommendations for Teaching

• Acknowledge hybrid identities• Encourage “divergent thinking”• Create spaces for border

students to reflect together• Be aware of emotional

demands involved in border identity development

• Allow choice in service site selection

• Include readings about organic intellectuals

Recommendations for Research

• Consider remapping the metaphor• Acknowledge hybrid identities• Deepen research into border student experiences• Utilize asset-based epistemologies (la facultad)

Creative Commons Image Credits: Jcarter, ZareK, Nathan Gibbs, Tricia Wang