Engaging College Students From Diverse Backgrounds in Community Service Learning

Community service learning at the university level is often conceived of as a mechanism for introducing privileged young adults to people with whom they have never interacted and experiences they have never had. American universities and courses involving community service learning are increasingly filling, however, with undergraduates who are members of the identity categories to which the community service learning experiences are intended to introduce them. The authors of this study consider the experiences of university students of color participating in a community service learning program. Opportunities for community service learning have grown increasingly prevalent on American college campuses. The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI, 2009) defines community service learning as “a form of experiential learning where students and faculty collaborate with communities to address problems and issues, simultaneously gaining knowledge and skills and advancing personal development.” According to HERI, 65% of American college students recently characterized their respective universities as offering opportunities for community service learning (Liu, Ruiz, DeAngelo, & Pryor, 2009). The majority of these opportunities are intended to engage privileged young adults in community service on behalf of individuals from marginalized or oppressed communities (Dunlap, 1998; Shadduck-Hernandez, 2005). As Butin (2006) has observed, “The overarching assumption is that the students doing the service-learning are White, sheltered, middle-class, single, without children, un-indebted, and between ages 18 and 24” (p. 481). Yet, increasingly, universities (and the community service learning courses these universities offer) are populated by undergraduates who do not fit into one or more of these privileged demographic categories (Jones, Castellanos, & Cole, 2002). An important question, then, is how students from nondominant groups experience community service learning courses that seek to introduce them to issues facing groups of which they themselves are a part. To date, only a handful of studies have reported on the community service learning experiences of students of color (Chesler & Scalera, 2000; Coles, 1999; Green, 2001; 1 Sarah Novick is a doctoral candidate at Boston University, and Scott Seider is an assistant professor of education at Boston University. Their current research focuses on character education at three highperforming urban charter schools. James Huguley is an advanced doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where his research focuses on educational achievement disparities by race and class in