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.