Service-Learning Partnership: Identifying Needs, Negotiating Service, and Navigating Learning in Pre-implementation Communication

Universities and tertiary institutions stereotypically are considered distant and removed from their surrounding communities. While community members and potential employers often complain about college graduates being “remote from the ground”, educators find it challenging to bring tertiary education “down-to-earth” and expand their teaching beyond the physical and virtual walls of their institutions. Service-learning is perhaps one of the best tools to connect the ivory tower with the wider communities it ought to serve ultimately.

In this video presentation, we share the experience of our 18 months’ journey of developing from scratch a service-learning course titled “Storytelling for Understanding: Refugee Children in Hong Kong”. In particular, we illustrate the negotiation process between our teaching team and the partner NGOs. The video presentation comprises three parts: initial difficulties in identifying the community needs, negotiation with the NGOs, and finally navigating student learning in the course. We argue that identifying the true needs of the community to be served is the most crucial yet most challenging component in service-learning development. Although service-learning aims to provide rare opportunities for our students to experience knowledge in the real world, when teachers set out to design a service-learning course, their focus should be temporarily shifted away from the students. As language teachers, we initially found it much easier to identify a storytelling course’s benefits to students than to identify its benefits to service recipients. Another problem was that we confused service with teaching, thinking that students will have to teach in order to serve. All of these difficulties arise from a mindset of “service-giving”, a somewhat condescending point of view. Therefore, open conversations and negotiations with the service partner(s) at a very early stage are the key to a service-learning course’s success. We realised that the service-learning course could only work with a “bottom-up” mindset after reaching Christian Action’s Jeffrey Andrews and having numerous conversations with him. After visiting his centre in Chung King Mansion, we began to shift our paradigm: service-learning is not single-minded giving, but a mutual, relational negotiation process. Once the needs are identified and incorporated into the course content properly, students learning outcomes click into place.

Based on our 18-month experience, we propose the following model for service-learning working teams: 1) determining deliverables of the course based on your expertise (in our case, a personal narrative in written and oral forms); 2) identifying an underprivileged community that truly needs service (e.g. refugee children); 3) reaching out to potential service partners, preferably experienced social workers who have first-hand experience with the identified service recipients; 4) visiting sites, meticulously discussing your ideas with the potential partners, and asking them to correct your misconceptions about the imagined needs; 5) revising the course contents in order to create a mutual learning experience for students and service recipients (e.g. 60% service + 40% storytelling workshops).