Critical Service Learning: Service beyond volunteerism

[Music] Okay, I'm Julius Bautista. Welcome to another episode of the Impact Experience Podcast. Now this is a podcast where we talk about university driven service learning and in doing so we talk a lot about how students can go into communities and try to contribute in a way that goes beyond what they learn in the classroom so that they impact positively on the lives of people outside of the academy. And we talk a lot about how students can do this while achieving their learning goals at the same time. And there are various ways of doing that. So the topic for today's chat is well what is service learning exactly? Okay, how can we define service learning and how can we distinguish service learning from other approaches that also have community engagement at its heart. And today I have a guest with me who I think is in a really prime position to talk about these topics. Dr. Jihan Lim is I would say you're actually a pioneer in at least the service learning program at this college, at NUAS College, because you were involved from from the very early stages of its conceptualization and implementation. And of course you and I are colleagues. We've gone through a lot of things together in terms of the you know iterating this program, you know, configuring it to various different versions. So I'm really glad that you're joining me, Jihan, because I think we can talk about the program from the perspective of designing it but also implementing it. And I'm glad that you've asked that you agree to join me today. So welcome, Jihan. Nice to see you. Thanks very much, Julius, for inviting me. Yes, Julius and I we go back a long way even before the saying of IEX. Yes, yeah, and both of us are anthropologists. So we click pretty well in our imagination of how the IEX program should look like. Exactly, but I also want to say first of all that you're coming into the program as someone who has been a former deputy director of the Impact Experience Project, which is really important thing. Aside from that of course, Jihan is a senior lecturer in NUAS College, which means that you also have interests in other domains, right? We might not necessarily talk about it too much in today's episode, but can you tell us a little bit about the other domains that you're interested in? And later maybe we'll sort of generate momentum into talking about our common interest in service learning. So tell me about your other other interests teaching wise and research wise. Well, I'm known as a medical anthropologist in the community, which means that I study medical systems as cultural systems. Right? So this means that as a medical anthropologist, we don't care too much about whether one medical system is more superior than the other. Right? So we study them like all other cultural systems. Right? We look at the internal logic, what they represent, what they symbolize, and most importantly, what they mean to people who engage in these medical practices. As someone who's been doing this for quite a while, the kind of topics that interest me revolve around anything to do with the human body, right? Not only from a physiological standpoint, but also from a political, economic, and most important of our cultural standpoint. Right? So I'm always dealing with issues about healthcare, about wellbeing, about body techniques, and of course, as someone who has been practicing martial arts for the past 35 years, right? I'm always concerned about the intersection between violence and culture, which of course is the body. I think university students, and this comes not only from my experiences teaching at universities, but over 15 years of teaching martial arts that, yeah, that in order to, for one of the better words, one of the better words, right, the worst martial arts disciples I've ever had are those who are highly educated. Oh yeah? Yeah. Because they're always looking for formulas and theories to memorize and apply. So I'm essentially telling them that, you don't just look at martial arts as a kind of a technique, right? So you don't evaluate them in terms of which one allows you to defeat an opponent much more effectively than another, but rather see them as cultural practices deeply and better in their circumstances. Right? So every single martial style adapts to the circumstances they find themselves in, right? And by adaptation, I'm not only talking about how we speak about martial arts, the forms, but actual physiological changes that comes with martial arts practices. So the body literally changes because it needs to adapt to the circumstances. Like water? Yes, like water? Like water? Yeah. So talk about this kind of movement from family interests in the body, in martial arts, and then looking at community engagement now. I think the bridge is simply experiential learning. Yes. As a part of the course. That's right. Right. It started, I think in 2015, 2016, when I was at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Right. Right. When I was asked to hit a program which is essentially a overseas study mission. And eventually they set up a center for experiential learning. And I was one of the very few faculty members there. Yes. Right. I was the, the academic, so-called academic lead of experiential learning. So I had to re-educate myself in what experiential learning means. Right. And I realized that the kind of interest I have in the bodies is intrinsically tied to experiential learning because you don't just learn through reading text, watching videos, right? You learn through and waste your bodies. Yeah. So every time you go out in the field, you talk to people, right? You don't read them like a text. Yep. Right. You sense them with all your possible senses in your bodies. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so, so conceptually, theoretically. Right. Experiential learning is the bridge. Yes. Now tell us about the pedagogical implications or pedagogical implementations that you've done so far at N. U.S. College. In particular, you know, we're thinking about I.E.X. groups and we're thinking about service learning groups. What's your experience being or how do you describe your experience so far? So, so, um, I mean, I've always tried to stay true to the experiential psychotherapy, right? That, that, that, that, that, David Cooktup, right? So, they have their four stages, concrete experience, reflective observation, extract conceptualization, and active experimentation. That's right. Right. Of course, they don't, don't happen in that sequence all the time. Yeah. But I've been trying to, to at least, right, in, in my supervision of my students to get them, right, to go through these four stages as much as possible. Right. And, um, but this is just the experiential learning part of it, right? Because if we were to talk about impact experience, essentially, right, it is what I like to call service learning on steroids. Right. Right. Because you compare to service learning programs in, in other universities, they don't, they don't, they don't have the sort of resources that the college provides. Right. And the first difference is that every single IES group has a faculty who mentors them. That's right. Yeah. And, and most service learning programs, are firstly, not necessarily credit bearing, right? No, do they stretch for two years? Exactly. Right. And the, and the duration. Right. And the upcoming new rebirth version is, it's going to go up to four units. We're going to have foundations. So we're going to have very strong academic, theoretical, competence at, at, at, at, at, you know, at, you know, preparation for students even before they go to the field. Eight, eight units, actually. Yeah. Eight units, right. From four to eight. Right. Well, yeah, you're right about that. I mean, the duration is one thing because I haven't encountered the service learning program that goes for four semesters. Have you? I've never seen anything that goes for that duration. Yeah. But I think that enables is, you know, developing longer term connections with community partners that you can build. It's not easy to sustain a relationship for two years, but that's one of the things that's expected by, for, for people doing IES. But the other thing that you mentioned, though, which, which I thought was also interesting was just the idea of, of actually having a supervisor who in, in, in, in this case, comes from different inter, disciplinary backgrounds. Like we're all, I mean, you and I happen to be from the same discipline, but our colleagues are from all sorts of different, you know, disciplinary backgrounds. Right. We have people from marine, marine, marine sciences. We have STEM. We have, um, colleagues who are in design. We have colleagues who are thinking about geography and many other disciplines. I think that really gives this program a kind of a diversity that is an asset if you ask me. So you know, those who kind of thrive in this sort of an environment of affordances and others that may struggle a little bit. But I think eventually they kind of get things together and realise that the autonomy is empowering rather than disabling. So they start to appreciate the kind of agency they have and realise that the reason why they don't know who they're supposed to feel for is because they have not met these people yet. But it's been hard for us as course givers too because we also need to make sure that you know the groups are doing things in a responsible way. We have to make sure of safety of course and you have to make sure of just the logistics of things. It hasn't always been simple but nevertheless worthwhile I think. But let's bring it all together and let me ask you. Is it fair to say that the model that we are deploying in impact experience can be described as service learning? And if that's so, let's come up with or at least let's talk about a very basic definition of what service learning is. It's one of those concepts that the name itself implies the meaning. But it's actually a lot more complicated than that. So how would you describe service learning in a kind of fundamental way? I think for starters, service learning should be understood as a pathological approach. It's a way of learning. Which makes it different from volunteerism. Right, yeah. It's a practice. Service learning is a pathological approach. Which means that there should be a component of service which allows students to learn something. Yes. The main objective of volunteering of volunteerism is to serve, to bring benefits to the communities or to prevent damage to an environment. So those are the things that are often done in Singapore and pre-universities. A lot of experience. They call it a values in action. It's a new version of what they use to call CIP. Many Singaporean students, if you're in public school, is mandatory. That's right. Starting in primary school. At least Singaporean students who come to the college have maybe 10 to 12 years of volunteering. Whereas once they come over here and they engage in impact experience, what we add to the volunteering part is the pathological part. That through service, we learn a lot about not only ourselves, we not only reflect on our relationship with the community and the society at large. But we also learn about what are some of the systemic causes of the problems that people face. The issues, the challenges that they have to deal with. But also how to go about implementing a co-created program coming up with a co-created product. That could not only help people for a short period of time while we're in the field. But even after we leave the field, the benefits continue to be enjoyed by the people we work with. The co-creative part that you mentioned is crucial, I think. The co-creation involves students, in this case university students, bringing in their particular interest and growing expertise in, for example, in discipline. So we have a student, for example, who majors in science. They would then be able to bring that major into their engagement with the community partner. And they collaborate in that way. There is a kind of sharing of expertise both from the student and from the community partner that happens in service learning that might not necessarily be as pronounced in a volunteerism framework. But basically service learning seems to be a volunteerism with a lot more pedagogical components to it. And those pedagogical components contribute to the student's own growth, personal growth, intellectual growth. In the course of experiential learning, which also ties into what we were talking about earlier. Let's talk about some challenges with service learning. What are the implementation challenges and what are the, even the experiential challenges of service learning? I think let's frame this within the concept of impact. Okay, whatever that gets in the way of impact. That's a challenge. So let's talk about the impact on learning itself. Oh, this is going to go on forever. Let me try to summarize. In order to benefit from the student to benefit from the service learning process. They need to be able to experience the academic impact. So they acknowledge about how things are the way they are. They include all those social scientific studies from STEM, from environmental studies. Why is environment being damaged? What causes it, so on and so forth. So this requires some kind of either foundation training or at least some kind of relation, active relating to what students have already picked up from their core curriculum at the college. Sometimes these doesn't happen without constant monitoring by the supervisor. Yes, active intervention at the programmatic level. Checkpoints. Yes, that's right. Checkpoints. In fairness, most universities around the world have community engagement components. This university is not unique in that. But yes, different universities and different programs do it in different ways. They have different emphases. For this particular program, one approach that we encourage is ABCD, which you mentioned earlier. But now maybe we could talk a little bit more substantively. ABCD, let's talk about what this means. ABCD stands for asset based community development. I kind of referred to it briefly earlier when I was talking about charity. The whole point of ABCD is to identify and optimize the assets. My approach to ABCD is trying to keep it as conceptually simple as possible. Instead of talking about it as assets, look at it as waste. If you see as waste, you start thinking, "Okay, if you see as waste," I think of things that are being wasted, which means that their values are not being optimized. My role is to go in and find these things and to figure out how best to extract the value. If these assets are already there and they will always be there, and if all of us learn how to optimize their values, then even if students are longer in the field, the better future is continued to benefit. That's the beauty of it, it ensures longevity. There are so many ways that you can think of examples for this one. Underutilized assets or maybe assets that have not been maximized for their full potential, it could be natural resources. Human skills, human knowledge, it could be unutilized spaces. Infrastructure. Infrastructure and so forth. It could be materials. The example that I always think about is this particular case in India, because during Hindu festivals, religious festivals, they often produce a lot of flowers just for the use of the festivities. And once the festivals are over, the flowers get discarded. So that's really being wasted. Waste. So someone came along and said, "Hey, why not we optimize the value of these flowers by working with a group of women who need employment, with their additional income, who has the skills of weaving those flowers, turning those flowers into something else, that people could use for other occasions, for instance, Valentine's Day." So the flowers don't go to waste, the rivers don't get polluted. to it, right? The women get an income, right? And people who buy those woven flowers, they get something that they could give to other people as well. Right. And it's that intervention, right, that constitutes an ABCD based service learning. It's being able to connect the waste with the resource. Yeah. In this case, the human resource, right? The waste is maybe a product of something, maybe a festival that happens anyway. It's already in the community. This waste is basically not being utilized. So the process of service learning is in being able to make that connection and facilitate the connection. Yeah, that's right. Right? It doesn't even have to be a community that's completely destitute. It doesn't have to be a community that's so desperately, you know, sort of in need, in need of intervention, it could just be in your neighborhood. It could be, you know, even further away, but also, also, right, right in your doorstep. So it's really about this mindset of being able to conduct service learning with this kind of deliberation. Yeah. Yeah. With an eye on potential. Yes, with the eye potential. Right. Potential that there's not been fully realized. Right. Right. Looking at waste, right? Right. As potential. Okay. So, first of all, this is the impact experience podcast. We are talking about what is service learning and we're looking at different components of not just service learning, but the different configurations that people have utilized in engaging with communities, especially from universities. Not just, I want to maybe not necessarily expand, but also maybe pivot this discussion into something that we're both familiar with and maybe our viewers and listeners would also be familiar with it. It's something called critical service learning. Right. So the addition of this component of critical changes the complexion of not just the concept of service learning, but the implementation. So let's talk about this critical component. What does this mean? Critical service learning. If you were to trace the origin of critical service learning, you will find that it has its amongst quite a few, right? I think the two main contributions to critical service learning will be Marxist philosophy and critical pedagogy. Right. Right. Because after all service learning is a pedagogy approach. Yes. So you put these two together then you have a specific perspective, right, of conducting service learning, not only to bring benefits to the community or to learn something along the way, right. But to also address systemic causes, yes, of most importantly injustice. Right. So going to the root cause of the systemic issues that have led to particular examples of waste, right. Why are things being waste? I mean, on the one hand, you're looking at, you're identifying the waste, but with the critical component, you're looking at, okay, well, why is this waste actually happening in a kind of repetitive way? Why is it continue to happen? So it looks like we're moving into a more, I suppose, meta, meta analysis of social structures, meta analysis of underlying causes that the critical component brings in. So let's talk about the practical implementation. Maybe now I can invite you to think in terms of advice and tips. How would you advise a group who wants to implement or put in practice the concept of A, B, C, D, and critical service learning, okay. Let's say what's the first thing that you would ask a group to do to implement all of these concepts? So the first stage is always a concrete experience, right. So the first thing that any group needs to do, right, is to first make contact with the communities you're working with. Don't assume too much. I think that's one of those things that anthropology teaches us, right, that many other disciplines don't really emphasise as much as we do, right. That you get to go in without too much assumptions about people, right. So because many of us, we come from a position of privilege, right. And the example of privilege, right, we carry with us a lot of assumptions about what the world is and what it should be. So the first thing that advice students do is go hang around with those people first, right, the people that you want to work with, that you think you could help, right. And you may realise that a lot of the way that you're the ones who may end up receiving more help them than from them, than the other people. Right. So go there, observe, listen, talk to them. Yeah, that's the first thing you should do. There's a really strong sense of humility involved in that, isn't there. When you go into a community, you're not simply going there and imposing your presence, right. You have to go there with a particular kind of attitude saying that I can also learn from you. And I would like to experience what you are experiencing because there is a sense in which humility is an important part of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, to be very sincerely curious about the people that you want to work with. Go find out about them first. Right. Do your ethnography, do your partism observation. Yes. I mean, you don't have to write a dissertation about it. Sure. But employ the methods as much as possible. Yes. Valuable advice. Yeah. Okay. How about in terms of sustaining the relationship? Because that's also an important part of how a project actually makes an impact. Keeping the process going, that's also difficult, right? Yeah, especially for students with a heavy workload. So how do you sustain this? Honestly, I don't have an answer to that question. Right. Because I'm thinking if I'm a student, I've got, I'm taking six, seven courses per semester. It's tough, man. Yeah. Right. To sustain that. Right. But I think over the long term, right? And I'm thinking about what happens after the two years are up. What happens? Yeah. After project completion. Yeah. After project completion, are you going to just ditch and then go and move on? Yeah. Right. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because one of the things that's being emphasized in IEX now is this practice of heading over to subsequent students coming in or subsequent cohorts. And maybe we can think about that also as a way of sustaining. Because I'm starting to think about this process myself. And I'm also starting to think that even student groups who are at the beginning of their project have to think about the afterlife, even at the early stage. It's not intuitive because at the first stages, you're still trying to get your momentum going. You're still trying to find your way. But I actually think that it helps to even think about, okay, who are the people in my future who might be able to take over from when I actually leave? Yeah. One of the things that I've actively done and I'm experimenting with this is that instead of the first cohort handing over to the third cohort. Yes. I have students to start taking over and start handing over. Really? Half way. Which is after the first year. So for the seniors who are handing over, it's not at the end. No. They start to hand over. At the end, they're already doing their creative practice. That's right. And they're kind of feeling that, okay, my project closing is over here right now. Just doing a creative practice component. So I got the new cohort to kind of jump in with the. Right at that point. Yeah, with the prerequisite that they have to expand upon it to refine it, to make it better in some ways. Right. So if it works out, who knows, it might be a new model going forward. Okay. All right. But speaking of going forward, so let me invite you now to share your thoughts in a different format, okay, where we're going to do a lighting round, which I've asked every guest in the podcast to do. So I'm going to think about some words and just share your immediate responses, all right? Okay. Before you go, right, I need to switch on my filter. Okay. Most are very afraid of the lighting ground. Right. Because, you know, I got some personalities that may come up with a bomb like this. Okay. I just switched off my filter. Well, that sounds exciting actually. All right. So let me just, okay, share with you the first one. Okay, the first word, power. Power. Inequality, injustice, exploitation, human suffering. Yeah. This can happen. I mean, this can be both the issue that you're confronting and the experience of engaging with community, right? Power differential. Yeah. Yeah. Abuse of power. Yeah. Abuse of power. - Vioset power. - Right. Okay. next word, creative. Creativity. Wow, I'm thinking of a divergent thinking versus conversion thinking. Right, because prior to this podcast recording I was just trying to cook up some activities for some of my students to help develop their creativity. Right, so yeah, a divergent thinking, right? Human judgment under uncertainty. Ah yes, yes, yes. - Under uncertainty. - Something that artificial intelligence - can't do very well. - Oh no, that was my word. My word was actually that. So I'm gonna have to think about something else now. All right, how about something of completely of music? Music. Wow. Without music there's no life. I associate music with dogs. Dogs, right? I think music and dogs are the two best things that can happen to me. The sonorous. Music doesn't necessarily have to be composed, right? It doesn't have to be a process of actually formal composition. - Yeah, it could be sounds. - Yeah. And I think musical proclivity is in all of us. I mean, look at my three kids, right? I mean, they start to sway. They start to be able to sing even before they're able to walk and even before they're able to speak. I think so too. I'm not entirely sure right now if we have a group doing music with anything on music in particular, but that's something I would really like to see. Someone working on. Sounds good, man. Music therapy, maybe. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking like a medical entrepreneur. Maybe that will be. Doesn't have to be therapy though. Might be in our future, but. With that, thanks very much, Shihann. I really, really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Today, I'm sure that our listeners and our viewers will find it really interesting to hear about these things. So, thanks for spending time. Let's continue the fight, shall we? Yes. We'll be able to fight another day. Yeah, see what I did there? I referenced your video in the first large course as a way of ending.