Suchergebnisse

Community service learning offers students the opportunity to cross socially constructed and epistemological borders of power and privilege, allowing them to come into contact with groups of people who are different from themselves and to learn in different ways. Peer facilitators, undergraduate student instructional leaders who guide others through these encounters, often experience especially powerful border crossing experiences, both by virtue of their service site supervision and their seminar leadership roles. Using their own writings and interviews, we explore some of these peer facilitators' border crossing experiences in a community service learning course at a large midwestern research university. We focus on how peer facilitators encounter various issues as they guide discussion of the experiences students have at community service sites in reflective seminars. The findings suggest that such border crossing experiences can encourage peer facilitators to reflect on their own social group identity and position within the larger social structures of privilege and oppression, and on their own learning styles and engagement in the higher educational environment.

For students who are actively engaged in social justice efforts on their college/university campuses, the transition from a relatively easy platform for engagement to the "real world" can pose significant challenges and create new realities for negotiation. Little is known, however, about the nature of these transitions into post-graduate social justice experiences. Drawing on an open-ended survey of recent graduates (92 respondents, 50% response rate) from a social justice minor in a school of social work, we explore the ways in which respondents described their transitions into social justice work, focusing on a set of key challenges that emerged from our analysis and reflecting on the implications of these challenges for social work practice and future research. Understanding some of the challenges in making this transition will help social work and non-profit administrators to better support this population's future volunteer, service, and employment needs.