By Tania D. Mitchell 

Editor’s Note: This provocative post comes out of comments at the 2013 Conference of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, where I was fortunate to appear on a panel with Sarah Brackmann (Southwestern University), Corey Dolgon (Stonehill College), Tania Mitchell (University of Minnesota), and John Reiff (UMASS – Amherst). The topic was, “Democratic and Community Engagement: A General Discussion of the Neoliberal Problem.” Much of the content could be seen as building upon Mitchell’s seminal 2008 work articulating critical service-learning in the Michigan Journal of Community Service-Learning. Corey Dolgon’s remarks – a challenging set of concerns that moved us to more deeply consider the social ends of service-learning engagement, as well as how to address the contexts in which we operate, domestically or globally – will appear this Wednesday.

How Neoliberal Ideology Fuels Complacency in Civic Engagement

Brandon Kliewer’s (2013) argument that the institutionalization of civic engagement in higher education coupled with a neoliberal ideology has stunted our ability to achieve (and potentially work for) social justice is an important consideration for those of us committed to social justice and the practice and promise of civic engagement work in higher education.

Civic engagement is most often praised as a universal good. It gets students into the community! It fulfills a needed service in the community! It creates opportunity for practical application and hands-on learning! What could be wrong? And this idea of engagement’s universal “goodness” has fueled its growth. Yet, Kliewer warns that “maintaining a civic engagement movement that does not account for neoliberalism [could undermine] the very democratic sentiments and institutions that the movement attempts to revive” (p. 73).

We do the work to connect our courses to service experiences and make cursory efforts to have our students reflect on those experiences and, more often than not, we see that work as good enough. We read the research that says that service learning improves retention, critical thinking, and promotes racial understanding. That civic engagement experiences strengthen leadership skills, improve academic performance, and foster greater citizenship. Our civic engagement practice, however, rarely interrogates the structural and ideological contexts that frame our work, it “tends not to address questions concerning the broader situation that generate the problems which then require service” (Coles, 2011, pp. 1-2).

This reluctance to question, I believe, is indicative of complacency in the civic engagement movement. I love the definition that the American Heritage Dictionary (2013) uses for complacency, “A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy.”

Complacency, by this definition, is unconscious and, perhaps worse, it is uncritical. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2013) adds that complacency comes with no desire or want for change…a sense that things as they are, are good enough. And, therefore, we can keep to business as usual.

In conversations about social justice, structural inequality, power and privilege, we often talk about oppression and the ways oppression manifests and must be challenged. Oppression is generally presented as having three levels: individual, societal, and institutional (Hardiman & Jackson, 1997). Each level reflects the different unconscious and conscious attitudes and behaviors that maintain systems of advantage and disadvantage based on social group membership. It is especially important to recognize and understand that these levels operate simultaneously and reinforce each other.

Similarly, I think the complacency that exists and inhibits the advancement of civic engagement’s justice aims also has three levels of conscious and unconscious behaviors and attitudes that operate simultaneously and reinforce each other preventing community engagement strategies from realizing the social justice outcomes that attract so many to the work.

At the individual level, complacency manifests in the egos of some practitioners. A lack of self-awareness and an unwillingness to interrogate our practice leads to assumptions of a critical pedagogy where there is none.

Complacency at the individual level also manifests in a sense of defeat or hopelessness that we see in students, faculty and sometimes community partners. It emerges from participating in the experience and not seeing the expected or anticipated change. From entering a community experience hoping for some magical transformation and being disappointed by the outcome. We get tired and frustrated and begin to ask “why bother?” believing that real change isn’t possible.

Another example of complacency at the individual level can be seen in the hesitance of faculty to engage in the political aspects of community engagement work. A fear of being seen as too radical, of isolating conservative students, of assuming our students can’t handle it. One of the consequences of the popularity of service-learning, argues Tony Robinson (2000), is its depoliticization. Faculty end up focusing more on the good deeds students do in their service placement rather than raising questions about the limits of service, the realities of structural inequality, and the more political (and perhaps revolutionary) work that would be necessary to bring about desired change.

A reliance on the efforts of the service-learning center on campus to manage partnerships or community relationships—to the extent that on some campuses faculty don’t actually know what students are doing in their service placements and have limited and often no contact with the community agencies (i.e., having never once traveled to the service site), where representatives from the service learning center are tasked with facilitating reflection on the service experience, where the service experience is merely an “add on” to an already developed curriculum is another manifestation of the complacency that limits advancing the social justice aims of civic engagement. This may also be an institutional manifestation, speaking to an emphasis on quantity over quality and a lack of resources for faculty development, but as I said these levels operate simultaneously and reinforce each other.

At the societal level complacency manifests in the work of the community agencies and schools we most often partner with in civic engagement experiences. The work that our partnering agencies do is often need-driven, not change-driven, so it can be difficult to develop community engagement experiences that address root causes of social concerns when that is not the priority of our accessible community partners.

This is also reflected in our dependence on a placement model that farms students out to sites as temporary (and replaceable) cogs in the wheel. We do this with an understanding, feeling or hope that it is easy on the organization or the students, but it is limited in impact and serves to reify the status quo.

An unwillingness to recognize the contributions of community partners as teaching partners is another example of complacency especially in regard to reconfiguring the unequal hierarchies in service relationships. Service-learning and civic engagement ask a great deal of the community partners who agree to partner with us, yet we rarely have the means to acknowledge their efforts as educators. Talmage Stanley (2013) of Emory and Henry University suggests that inviting a community partner into the classroom without extending an honorarium “extend[s] the class silences” and reifies unequal power structures and yet this is a dominant practice in service-learning.

Complacency at this level also manifests in an absence of research that looks closely at programmatic dimensions. Too much research on service-learning and civic engagement reports that “students did service as part of this class and great things happened!” rather than interrogating the pedagogical aspects of content, facilitation, and design. So, the most accessible research does not do a good job of informing the field about the specific innovations in practice that may bring us closer to desired social justice aims.

At the institutional level, the university calendar is one of the most obvious places where complacency manifests. The challenge of the university calendar, to embark on a social change project in a ten-week quarter or sixteen-week semester, to develop an experience that fosters authentic dialogic engagement is nearly impossible.

Institutional complacency can also be seen in the grant-driven realities of non-profits. Kliewer (2013) presents an effective critique of the Allstate Foundation and the implications of neoliberal ideology on the competitive grants processes that comprise the bulk of agency funding. Because our partner agencies need to be responsive to funder priorities, and because the requirements of grants often dictate the ways that an organization may respond to a critical social concern, opportunities for transformative action responsive to the issue is not always possible.

The marginalization of civic engagement as a respected way of teaching is another reflection of complacency institutionally. Junior faculty are often encouraged to wait until they are post-tenure to do community engagement work, and the bulk of service-learning opportunities on some campuses are led by non-tenure line faculty. Service-learning and community engagement takes more time and it can be difficult to invest in this kind of work if you fear it will not be respected or rewarded.

Finally, institutional complacency is also about the ways we report impact or effect. Too often impact is reduced to numbers of hours or, as in the 2011 Campus Compact annual report, billions of dollars as opposed to reporting on the transformative potential (or limits) of our engagement work. What does this communicate about what we value from community engagement work?

In 1994, Nadinne Cruz, defined service-learning as “a process of integrating intention with action in the context of a movement toward a just relationship.” The social justice aims of civic engagement work are part of our history. But, I think these struggles with complacency, perhaps fueled by neoliberal ideology, have prevented us from finding a way to fully realize the potential of this practice.

 References

American Heritage Dictionary (2013). Complacency. Retrieved October 11, 2013 from http://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=complacency&submit.x=55&submit.y=21

Campus Compact (2011). Deepening the roots of civic engagement. 2011 Annual membership survey: Executive summary. Retrieved February 22, 2012 from http://www.compact.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2011-Annual-Survey-Executive-Summary.pdf

Coles, R. (2011). Cultivating pedagogies for civic engagement and political agency: Reflections for discussion of the theory and practice of democratic transformations in higher education. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation.

Cruz, N. (1994). Notes of the author, Reexamining service-learning in an international context, workshop, Annual Conference of the National Society for Experiential Education, Washington, D.C. November 11.

Hardiman, R. & Jackson, B. W. (1997). Conceptual foundations for social justice courses. In M. Adams, L. A. Bell, & P. Griffin (Eds.) Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook (pp. 16-29). New York: Routledge.

Kliewer, B. W. (2013). Why the civic engagement movement cannot achieve democratic and justice aims. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 19(2), 72-79.

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2013). Complacent. Retrieved October 11, 2013 from http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/complacent

Robinson, T. (2000). Dare the school build a new social order? Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 7, 142-157.

Stanley, T. A. (2013). “Walking a different way”: Coeducators, co-learners,
 and democratic engagement renaming the world. In A. Hoy & M. Johnson (Eds.) Deepening community engagement in higher education: Forging new pathways (pp 95-104). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Tania D. Mitchell is an assistant professor in the department of postsecondary teaching and learning at the University of Minnesota’s college of education and human development. Her teaching interests include social justice theory, civic discourse, public service, college student development and the pedagogy, philosophy and practice of service-learning in higher education.  Much of her research focuses on service-learning as a critical pedagogy to explore civic identity, social justice, student learning and development, race and racism, and community practice.

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