It's a New Year!

The staff meeting/dinner last night was both a time of reunion and a time to get acquainted. Like the half-time of a team sport, the introduction of new staff members promises an interesting change in office dynamics: Four staff members will leave to work or study in Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, and Thailand in the Far East while four return from their semesters abroad in Egypt, Honduras, and Ghana. Together with the returners are 3 new staff members who bring fresh perspective and energy. Well, technically it should be 2 because Christina has being helping out in the office last semester.

Like any sport, those who are leaving or have left the office are not people whom the office groomed and “lost.” Rather, the office has produced change agents to serve others in other locations. Look at David Beckham—his move from England to the States a few years ago created new excitement and interest in soccer. The same for the S-LC Beckhams around the world, they too are introducing hope to places in which they are serving. Speaking of which, an S-LC alumni page is a work in process to highlight some of our Beckhams addressing real social problems. Hopefully these stories will inspire and encourage us in this dark and sad world, and instill in us a sense of urgency to not only be consumers of other people's kindness but also be producers of kindness to others. That's why I particularly enjoyed the Skype meeting we had with Heidi, an S-LC alumna, last semester. That's why it is always nice whenever Beckham shares what he knows with young recruits at the football academies because everyone needs a role model, a mentor, and a sounding board.

Learning in Community

I was shocked when I read it, the Time Magazine "Person of the year" is me. Well, not me particularly, it is all of us, the bloggers, the IMers, the YouTubers, the cyber generation committed to expressing our own views and opinions through accessible technologies for a mass audience. Many have observed that in the midst of all that is good about these new communication technologies, there is a certain egoism at play. I am still undecided on this point, but regardless, I will admit that the broad access provided by new communication technologies has, ironically, atomized our existences from one another even amidst allowing us to come into contact with more people then ever before. There is a tremendous amount of speaking happening in the world today, but it is not as clear that there is as much listening happening. Many believe that they have something to say, but not many are willing to listen to others around them and before them. I worry that we are drowning one another out with the sound of our own voices, failing to actually inhabit the space of learning with another person by listening to them.
Service-learning does not happen in a vacuum removed from this growing tendency to assert one's own position and voice while failing to listen and learn from others. My hypothesis is that when we engage in service-learning, we are oriented to service necessarily taking place in community, however we imagine the learning as an internal, isolated process and event. That is, we imagine a going out of ourselves to serve another, but then we return back into the interior of our own minds to learn. To be sure, genuine learning does restructure and enhance the inner working of our minds, and has an autonomous aspect, but learning is not exclusively this. I assert that learning at its best, and most especially in the case of authentic service-learning, must happen in the community as well. Here, I imagine an actual dialog taking place in which we actively process our experiences out loud with other individuals from within and outside the communities we serve and live in. I would venture further to say that there is a desperate need for mentoring relationships when especially engaging in service-learning. Contrary to the isolation of speaking without listening, mentoring relationships help to ensure that we find wisdom and guidance from something outside of ourselves. Amidst the sometimes disorienting nature of service-learning, mentors can offer us a safe place to grow and rebuild after having knocked down false assumptions and other bad habits of thinking and doing.
To anyone that will engage in service-learning, I say, serve in community, but also learn in community. Against the predominant tread of societal interactions, seek out mentoring relationships as an essential part of the service-learning experience.