Stories from service: How a service-learning experience contributed to privileged students\u27 discourse about public education

Privileged members of society take part in traditional forms of civic engagement at higher rates than less privileged members of society. Work on this civic empowerment gap has focused on the civic engagement of less privileged members of society rather than how more privileged members of society contribute to the maintenance of this gap. Service learning is a widespread pedagogy for civic education that has positive impacts on civic engagement. This study describes how a group of private school students learned about public education through their involvement in service learning. The study focused on a group of fifteen 10th grade students in a private, Quaker, independent school. These students were taking a class about Quaker values that involved tutoring 1st grade students in a public school. The study employed a sociocultural, qualitative methodology involving participant observation, interviews, video recordings, and review of written student work. The study shows that tutoring in a public school and discussing public education gave the 10th grade students an opportunity to learn about public school students, their teachers, and their parents. The 10th grade students\u27 proximity to the practice of these groups during service created different opportunities for learning. More direct engagement with the students, teachers, or parents enabled the 10th graders to tell more detailed stories during discussions about public education and presented more challenges to their original ideas about students, parents, and teachers in public schools. In this case, learning occurred through a dialogic interaction between experiences in service and in the classroom. When students discussed public education without close engagement with the practice of others during service they talked about the issue without detailed inclusion of the perspectives of others, relying on ideas they held prior to the experience. However, when students had the opportunity to engage directly with others during service, they addressed public education in a way that gave greater consideration to others, adapting the ideas the students held prior to the experience. This illustrates the way that service learning both has the potential to further and to inhibit the development of ideal civic practices