The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning

Service learning has become an institutionalized practice in higher education. Students are sent out to disadvantaged communities to paint, tutor, feed, and help organize communities. But while the students gain from their experiences, the contributors to The Unheard Voices ask, "Does the community?"

This volume explores the impact of service learning on a community, and considers the unequal relationship between the community and the academy. Using eye-opening interviews with community-organization staff members, The Unheard Voices challenges assumptions about the effectiveness of service learning. Chapters offer strong critiques of service learning practices from the lack of adequate training and supervision, to problems of communication and issues of diversity. The book's conclusion offers ways to improve service learning so that future endeavors can be better at meeting the needs of the communities and the students who work in them.

Randy Stoecker is a Professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, with a joint appointment in the UW-Extension Center for Community and Economic Development. He is the author of Research Methods for Community Change: A Project-Based Approach and Defending Community: The Struggle for Alternative Redevelopment in Cedar-Riverside (Temple).

Elizabeth A. Tryon is the Community-Based Learning Coordinator at the Morgridge Center for Public Service based within the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously she was a community partner specialist for the Human Issues Studies Program at Edgewood College’s School of Integrative Studies, Madison, Wisconsin.

Amy Hilgendor is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Human Development and Family Studies.