Abstract
Leveraging the pandemic as a “portal” requires individuals and communities to examine the causes and consequences of multiple interlinked sources of trauma, to embrace the opportunity thereby presented to reframe perspectives and practices, and to deepen the empathic and caring nature of their ways of knowing and being. Service-learning, which has great potential in this context but is underutilized in higher education, can generate such transformational learning outcomes. Designing service-learning must be informed by the realities of trauma and oriented toward growth and change if it is to be used as a means for transformation. This chapter draws upon the frameworks of healing-centered engagement (HCE) and mindfulness to inform the design of transformational service-learning. The implications of HCE and mindfulness are explored in four design domains: critical reflection, civic learning, partnerships, and community change.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. – Arundhati Roy, The Pandemic is a Portal
We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was never normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature. – Sonya Renee Taylor, Instagram
TopIntroduction
This moment is rich with transformative potential—a moment of crisis that, although not unique in history, is precious in that it offers an unusually explicit opportunity to re-examine and to change, individually and collectively, in fundamental, life-affirming, and paradigm-shifting ways. Such transformational change, as the opening quotes suggest, involves problematizing what is taken to be “normal,” seeking something better (deeper connections, greater justice), imagining different systems, and making different choices.
Such transformation requires acknowledgment of and engagement with historic and contemporary trauma: the trauma surfaced and induced by the global COVID-19 pandemic but also, and interrelatedly, racial tensions, political polarization, climate change, and economic inequality. Trauma involves emotional, psychological, and physical responses to such forces as threat, violence, illness, death, disaster, poverty, dislocation, loss of control, and ongoing uncertainty in ways that strain or overwhelm coping mechanisms (e.g., regulating emotions, managing stress and anxiety, maintaining hope). It can be acute and chronic, direct and secondary, and experienced by individuals and communities. It can “compromise an individual’s mental health and overall well-being,” “alter social networks,” and “reduce community capacity to … address … problems and plan for [the] future” (Organizing Engagement, 2019, para. 9). Of particular significance to leveraging the transformative potential of the pandemic, trauma can “undermine ‘readiness’ for individual and community change” (para. 9). The challenge—and opportunity—of the pandemic serving as a “portal” is to transform trauma and to leverage it as a catalyst for and driver of growth and transformational change.
As practitioner-scholars in higher education, the authors view transformational change—always, but especially now—as contingent on transformational learning: learning that involves “shifting from mindless or unquestioning acceptance of available information to reflective and conscious learning experiences” (Simsek, 2012, p. 201) and results in “dramatic and fundamental change in the way we see ourselves and the world in which we live” (Brown & Posner, 2001, p. 274). Leveraging the pandemic as a portal requires individuals and communities to examine the causes and consequences of multiple interlinked sources of trauma, to embrace the opportunity thereby presented to reframe perspectives and practices, to recognize and question often taken for granted norms and status quo, and to deepen the empathic and caring nature of ways of knowing and being. The authors seek to generate such transformational learning outcomes (among themselves as well as their students and other partners in teaching and learning) particularly through the pedagogy of service-learning, which has great potential in this context but is underutilized in higher education. Designing service-learning (or any other type of experiential education)—always, but especially now—must be informed by the realities of trauma and oriented toward growth and possibility if it is to be used as a means for transformation.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Mindfulness: A set of principles and practices that focus on awareness, metacognition, flexibility, withholding judgment, calmness in the face of stress, and openness to new ways of being and thinking. Mindfulness includes meditative practice and socio-cognitive perspectives.
Healing-Centered Engagement: A framework for healing from trauma that does not focus on the symptoms but on developing well-being including identity restoration through culturally grounded methods that address the root causes of the trauma utilizing the assets of the individuals and community and recognizing that healing is needed for all.
Trauma: Stress and chronic outcomes due to such events as acute and ongoing violence, crime, and oppression; loss of life; natural disasters; epidemics and other unanticipated or lingering health challenges; poverty; and war.
Experiential Education: A set of teaching and learning strategies in which learners undertake experiences that confront them with ideas, questions, and theories related to learning goals and use structured critical reflection to make meaning of those experience in accordance with those learning goals and, often, to translate that learning into action.
Service-Learning: A form of experiential education in which students, representatives of community organizations, faculty/instructors, campus administrators/staff, and community residents co-create partnerships. Critical reflection integrates community-engaged activities (“service”) and course content to generate both learning (academic learning, civic learning, personal growth) and change (individual, organizational, institutional, community).
Critical Reflection: A process of meaning-making. The component of experiential learning processes that, when structured in accordance with learning goals, generates, deepens, and provides authentic evidence of learning.
Partnerships: Structured, enduring community-campus relationships that are asset-based and co-created. They are usually composed of students, representatives of community organizations, faculty, campus administrators, and community residents.
Civic Learning: A category of learning goals that by definition characterizes service-learning and is also increasingly incorporated in other forms of experiential education. Civic learning goals are related to the roles and responsibilities of individuals as members and shapers of broader communities.
Design Domains: Processes and outcomes of a teaching and learning strategy about which intentional choices are made in accordance with, for example, learning (and other) goals, learners’ (and other partners’) characteristics, constraints, course format, course content, classroom climate, and assessment goals.