“Can I Major in Service-Learning?” An Empirical Analysis of Certificates, Minors, and Majors

This article examines the rise of programs in higher education that award certificates, minors, and/or majors in service-learning. Using Vaughn and Seifer (2008) as a foundation, this study documented and analyzed a total of 31 academic programs that had service-learning at its academic core. Findings from this study suggest that there is indeed a coherent (though far from stable) “field” of service-learning. Moreover, the findings suggest that the strength and structure of a program is strongly dependent on its status; that is, there is a deep dividing line between certificate programs and minors and majors. This has implications for how service-learning scholars and practitioners talk about and thus organize themselves, their field, and their body of core knowledge. The article concludes by highlighting key programmatic and curricular features, examining the status of service-learning as a distinct discipline and drawing forth implications for institutions considering developing service-learning certificates, minors, and majors. “Can I major in service-learning?” At almost any institution of higher education, such a query by an undergraduate student would seem unintelligible. Service-learning—the linkage of academic coursework with community-based service within the framework of respect, reciprocity, relevance, and reflection (Butin, 2010a)—has long been theorized and enacted as both a pedagogy and philosophy that can be superimposed on all aspects of the academy. From institutional homepages to alumni magazine covers, and across academic disciplines ranging from anthropology to zoology, service-learning has been positioned as a critical component to the revitalization of civic and political engagement on college campuses (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007; Colby, Beaumont, Ehrlich, & Corngold, 2007) and an important marker of deep learning in the undergraduate experience. One does service-learning; one doesn’t study it. Yet at two dozen or so institutions, such a question is legitimate and commonplace, because these institutions offer certificates, minors, and/or majors in service-learning (or a comparably named program such as “community engagement”). On a limited level, this realization— of seemingly coherent academic programs—raises an immediate question of in what do these students actually major? What do they learn and how do they learn it? At a deeper level, the ability to ask whether one can major in service-learning raises a host of questions about the status, viability, and institutionalization of service-learning in higher education. This article explores both of these types of questions. It does so, moreover, against the backdrop that even as service-learning gains increasing visibility and currency in the academy, recent scholarship has become more critical of its impact in higher education (Keen & Hall, 1 Dan W. Butin is the founding dean of the school of education at Merrimack College. He is the author of The Education Dissertation and Service-Learning in Theory and Practice. Butin’s research focuses on issues of educator preparation and policy, and community engagement. He can be contacted at dan.butin@ merrimack.edu. Peer Reviewed Article JCC © NASPA 2010 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc/ doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1035 2009; Stoecker & Tyron, 2009). As a recent report (Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009) has noted, the civic engagement movement has stalled, due, in part, to its being inadequately conceptualized and highly fragmented; it verges on “stand[ing] for anything and therefore nothing” (Saltmarsh et al., 2009, p. 4). This article thus examines the question of the value and positioning of service-learning in higher education by inverting how the institutionalization of service-learning is traditionally conceptualized. Namely, rather than depicting service-learning as something simply done across higher education, it presents what service-learning may look like when it is deeply embedded in an academic program such as a certificate, minor, or major. Its purpose is to foster curricular and co-curricular discussions about what students, faculty, and institutions of higher education are actually doing when they “do” service-learning. This is an important discussion for the higher education field. Vaughn and Seifer (2008) have documented 25 programs in higher education that award certificates, minors, and/or majors in service-learning (or a similarly named program), which reveals an important and unacknowledged dilemma: if service-learning is being positioned as worthy of academic investigation, and even as equivalent—given its status as a minor or major—to traditional academic fields, what is one studying about and majoring in? To ask “can I major in service-learning?” raises a host of new questions about its status in higher education (see, e.g., Battistoni, 1997). In part questions about its status are due to the fact that academic disciplines and fields teach undergraduates specific and distinctive habits of thinking (Baxter Magolda, 1999; Becher & Trowler, 2001). Ways of looking at and studying the world are radically different in, for example, economics, physics, anthropology, and women’s studies. To claim a program major in service-learning is thus to posit that there is a distinct academic mode of thinking and being that fosters undergraduates’ awareness in a fairly distinctive way that goes far beyond service-learning as pedagogical method or philosophical orientation. For a student can major in economics, but not in quantitative research; in education, but not in cooperative learning; in women’s studies, but not in feminism. By positioning service-learning as a major (or a minor), scholars suggest that there is an explicit, coherent, and bounded field of knowledge. The question is what exactly this may be. But to a larger extent, the existence of these concentrations, minors, and majors raises a thornier issue for the service-learning movement regarding its positioning in higher education. The recent Carnegie Foundation’s (Carnegie, 2006) creation of a voluntary classification of “community engagement”—by which postsecondary institutions can demonstrate how community engagement and outreach permeate every facet of institutional life from its mission statement to curricular offerings to tenure and promotion proceedings—is but one prominent example of the idea of service-learning as a social movement across higher education. Yet the continued construction of several dozen academic programs focused on community engagement and servicelearning suggests that alternative modes of conceptualizing service-learning exist and, indeed, potentially thrive. I have argued a similar point from a theoretical perspective: that there is a strong and untapped potential for “academizing” service-learning by creating “academic homes” in academic programs (Butin, 2006a, 2006b), whereby service-learning begins to be thought about as both an “intellectual movement” and more commonly a “social movement” (Butin, 2010b). Such “disciplining” of service-learning, I have suggested, may more thoroughly and fruitfully institutionalize it into higher education, for if service learning cannot discipline itself, and if it cannot gain the professional and social legitimacy to control its own knowledge production, develop its own disciplinary 2 Journal of College and Character VOLUME 11, No. 2, May 2010 doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1035 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc/ © NASPA 2010 JCC boundaries and norms, and critique and further its own practices, it will be unsustainable as a transformative agent within higher education. (Butin, 2006b, p. 59) I have, moreover, offered multiple examples—for example, women’s studies, Black studies—of social movements that have transformed themselves into intellectual movements in order to demonstrate a potential complementary model of an “academic home” for how service-learning may begin to reconstitute and rethink its own relationship to the academy (Butin, 2010b). This article examines this issue through an empirical analysis. Specifically, it describes a study which examined 31 already existing programs in higher education (using Vaughn and Seifer [2008] as a foundation) that award certificates, minors, and/or majors in “service-learning” (or a comparable term such as “civic engagement”) as its academic core. Put otherwise, it takes the on-the-ground reality of the numerous and expanding group of academic programs in servicelearning and examines them through a specific theoretical lens in order to determine whether there is indeed a common core—be it programmatic, curricular, and/or instructional—that informs an academic program focused on service-learning. Given the inductive nature of the data—that is, arising from each specific academic program—no claim is made of formal comparability across programs. Rather, what holds these programs together as worthy of analysis is instead their self-defining as coherent academic programs. Such self-definitions create multiple limitations to the findings: it is unclear to what extent programs with the same or similar names have similar conceptualizations of their practices, and numerous programs may have not been included that do not self-define in this way or use slightly different terminology to define themselves. As the conclusion to this article makes clear, though, such a limitation is actually a manifestation of the way that the service-learning field has organized itself and the consequences thereof. Finally, this study’s findings are limited both by the small number of programs analyzed and by the fact that the unit of analysis was the documents (e.g., departmental websites, syllabi) and not actual faculty practices or student beliefs. Nevertheless, this article suggests that it is possible to engage the question of “Can I major in service-learning?” in a productive manner in order to highlight the convergences and distinctions across service-learning programs and what this might mean for the state of the service-learning movement in higher education. The findings from this study suggest that there is a coherent (though far from stable) “field” of service-learning. These findings have implications for how service-learning scholars and practitioners talk about and organize themselves, their field, and their body of core knowledge. Moreover, the findings suggest that the strength and structure of a program are strongly dependent on its status; that is, there is a dividing line between certificate programs and minors and majors. This division has implications for institutions considering developing service-learning certificates, minors, and majors. Finally, linking these two implications is the realization that scholars in numerous fields are already “disciplining” servicelearning helter-skelter based on their particular contexts and specializations. It may thus be time to bring more scholarly attention and consideration to this phenomenon in order to better understand it and guide it. Theoretical Framework The empirical analysis of majors, minors, and certificates is premised on the notion that the crucial unit of analysis for knowledge construction, legitimation, and transmission in higher education is the academic program, and, more specifically, the academic department. This notion has its basis in classical sociology of knowledge, that is, organizational differentiation of knowledge and labor is determined by and linked to the structure and particular social context of “Can I Major in Service-Learning?” 3 JCC © NASPA 2010 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc/ doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1035 bureaucratic institutions (e.g., Weber, 1948). The “new” sociology of knowledge, and specifically the sociology of higher education, has in turn focused this insight on the mediating function of particular organizational units as impacting the functioning of higher education (e.g., Gumport & Snydman, 2002; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Thus Light (1974) has persuasively shown that “the knowledge base for each profession is its discipline” (p. 259) and understanding the functioning of higher education is dependent on the realization that “academics are possessed by disciplines, fields of study, even as they are located in institutions” (Clark, 1987, p. 25). Such a perspective of the functioning of higher education avoids the over-generalizations prone to macro perspectives of entire institutions while at the same time allows for a theory generation above a micro analysis of individual practices. Clark’s (1987) classic argument that the academic department is “the basic unit of organization because it is where the imperatives of the discipline and the institution converge” (p. 64) may be seen, for example, in the recent emphasis of the public scholarship movement’s (Ellison & Eatman, 2008) focus on a similar strategy for change: Why are we so interested in chairs, deans, and directors? Departments, and the units with which they interact, are where tensions arise about the value of publicly engaged scholarship at the point of promotion or tenure. They are where all the work of promotion gets done and where the potential for real change is greatest. We are reaching out to department chairs in this report because they have been overlooked as key partners in public scholarship. (p. v) The academic department may be seen as the primary site for the creation, legitimation, and transmission of knowledge and knowledge categories within higher education. While these departments, and the faculty within them, are part of larger nested academic communities (e.g., their home institutions, their disciplinary fields, the funding streams of private and public grantmaking authorities), the micro-workings of particularities are played out within the academic department, for example, decisions about the focus of tenure-track hires; the structuring of core requirements; and the articulation of relevance to college stakeholders. All of these daily practices and rituals (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) build up to structure, solidify, and maintain a field’s relevance and legitimacy. Put more formally, the specific settings and practices shape “the content and forms of ideas” in higher education; and specifically, the ritualization of knowledge categories occurs through the creation and maintenance of departments and degree programs. In these settings, the knowledge categories and their labels contribute to what counts as knowledge. They not only provide a location where participants generate local knowledge of departmental procedures and program completion expectations, but they also designate the knowledge most worth knowing within the field. (Gumport & Snydman, 2002, p. 379) Such knowledge generation—at both the local and global levels—cannot be assumed to occur naturally in higher education, especially not for fields often initially deemed non-academic (see, e.g., the development of diverse social movements such as “Black Power” or feminism into, respectively, Black studies and women’s studies as intellectual movements [Frickel & Gross, 2005; Rojas, 2007; Stanton & Stewart, 1995; Wiegman, 2005]). Rather, Metzger (1987) suggests that such academic transformations occur through “subject dignification,” whereby new areas of academic study in higher education gain currency through mimicking traditional academic models and nomenclature in order to “overcome an initially ignoble reputation” (p. 129). This study will examine how service-learning majors, minors, and certificates take on the key attributes of curriculum, instruction, and structure as found in traditional academic departments. This 4 Journal of College and Character VOLUME 11, No. 2, May 2010 doi:10.2202/1940-1639.1035 http://journals.naspa.org/jcc/ © NASPA 2010 JCC theoretical framework both allows a focus on the structuring of academic programs—majors, minors, and certificates—in service-learning and provides insights into how to analyze such structuring. This perspective of the “disciplining” of service-learning is antithetical to almost all analyses of the institutionalization and structuring of service-learning in higher education. As noted earlier, the service-learning field conceptualizes itself as able to span both horizontally across academic departments and vertically across organizational structures (Brukardt, Holland, Percy, Simpher, on behalf of Wingspread Conference Participants, 2004; Furco, 2002; Saltmarsh et al., 2009). The “home” for service-learning is viewed as the entire higher education institution. Yet as I have argued (Butin, 2006a, 2010a), there is now a large body of empirical and theoretical evidence that raises doubts of the viability of such a perspective. As such, it becomes necessary to investigate the academic department as the crucial unit of analysis.