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  • Stepping Up and Out:Strategies for Promoting Feminist Activism within Community Service-Learning
  • Maythee Rojas (bio)

Too often, the thought of wishing our students could step into our teaching shoes tends to cross our minds only when we feel particularly underappreciated or misunderstood. During an especially exasperating moment, we might reason that if students could only grasp the sheer amount of information, logistics, and patience that we balance every day, they would actually recognize the value of our instruction. Ironically, however, the authoritarian nature of traditional pedagogy is frequently what prevents this sensitivity from forming. Distanced from one another by the conventional power dynamics between student and professor, there is little opportunity for students to recognize the full scope of what teaching entails. While the result for us can be frustration, for students, the lack of active participation in their learning can lead to more significant disadvantages in their intellectual preparation. Teaching, as we know, allows one to “try out” what one has learned and articulate that knowledge to others. It builds skills. Without having their own turn at it, students can leave the classroom—and eventually the university—without a clear direction of how to perform their educations. In turn, this can prove detrimental to the job-seeking graduate, and it can further undo the very premise of our instruction. In particular, for those of us who identify as feminist instructors and see teaching as a conduit to promoting social justice, ensuring that students can “do” what they have learned seems essential. Indeed, rather than simply wanting students to take a spin at teaching so they can better relate to us, the real solution may lie in expanding such a fitful wish for gratitude into an overall teaching philosophy.

In other words, pressing for a more reciprocal teaching environment in the classroom might not only garner us our students’ empathy more often, it could also pave the way for the greater social change we seek. Reciprocal collaboration, however, requires finding more opportunities than those typically offered in a traditional classroom setting. Even within feminist studies, where students’ participation in their individual educations has long been a central tenet of curricula, exercises that emphasize sharing what students have learned are frequently confined to campus or classroom activities. [End Page 83]

My own home department at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) provides students with two options to fulfill the praxis requirement of their women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS)1 degree: students can either facilitate a series of small group peer discussions on topics covered throughout a semester in sections of our Women and Their Bodies course;2 or, they can elect to take Community Service-Learning in Women’s Issues (CSLWI), where they conduct forty hours of community service at one of five preselected sites that work with girls, women, and their families. Intended as a community practicum for WGSS majors and minors and others interested in women’s issues in action, the intent behind the CSLWI course is for students to put into practice the theories and knowledge they have gained as a result of studying social issues affecting women’s lives.

Unfortunately, for several years, our department’s former choice overshadowed the latter one so much so that the service-learning course was almost rendered obsolete. The easy access of staying on campus along with the familiarity and comfort of working with likeminded peers boosted the facilitation course’s popularity. In contrast, CSLWI’s extensive service requirement coupled with written assignments and classroom time daunted many of our working-class students who already juggle a full school load with demanding work and family responsibilities. More recently, however, and under my direction, the service-learning course’s classroom enrollment has seen a comeback and now shares a comparable level of interest with its counterpart. In fact, almost invariably, every student who takes Community Service-Learning in Women’s Issues argues passionately in her/his final reflection that the course ought to be mandatory for the WGSS degree. Chief among their reasons is that interacting with actual organizations allowed them to employ skills to address issues that they had only previously studied about in other classes. Furthermore, it...

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