26M.A. Erasmus1 SERVICE LEARNING: PREPARING A NEW GENERATION OF SCIENTISTS FOR A MODE 2 SOCIETY

Preparing students to become full participants, as future scientists and professional practitioners, in what Michael Gibbons (2006) refers to as a Mode 2 society, is a challenge that South African higher education institutions are currently taking up. An increasing number of these institutions consider the community-based experiential pedagogy of service learning as a valuable form of community engagement which actively involves not only staff and students, but also external partners in the public space, or agora, where knowledge production is negotiated in a myriad of transaction spaces by a wide variety of stakeholders. In this article, I will argue that Gibbons ’ notion of engagement as a core value in a Mode 2 society could serve as a theoretical and metaphoric framework that adds to the understanding of how service-learning modules create transaction spaces, where students and community members are encouraged to be knowledge workers at the point of intersection of institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Examples from the field will be utilised to illustrate how the service-learning approach allows for the contextualisation of both community and curriculum development, enhancing students ’ understanding of their social responsibility and encouraging them to join the body of scientists and other practitioners who are taking up the challenge to produce the socially robust knowledge that a Mode 2 society demands