Abstract
Service-learning has received a great deal of attention in the management education literature over the past decade, as a method by which students can acquire moral and civic values as well as gain academic knowledge and practice real-world skills. Scholars focus on student and community impact, curricular design, and rationale. However, the educational environment (“context”) in which service-learning occurs has been given less attention, although experienced educators know that the classroom is hardly a vacuum and that students learn a great deal from the non-curricular aspects of their educational experience. Moral values in particular are conveyed by what is not said. Given this, I argue that the contexts in which service-learning takes place are as important as the activity itself. Three perspectives on context will be described and assessed: the “hidden” curriculum, the educational atmosphere, and the university’s orientation towards social responsibility.
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Notes
Not taken into account in this analysis are the pressures beyond the walls of the school: media, family, community, religion, business, government. Though these are powerful societal forces, and surely impact schools’ efforts to educate for morality and civility, management educators’ ability to influence them is minimal. Also not taken into account is the context surrounding a particular service-learning experience, also known as the program design, i.e. site, background, reflection, and planning (Hecht 2003). While this programmatic level is crucial to the success of a particular service program, my interest is in that which extends beyond the program design.
See Colby et al. (2003) for a cogent discussion of the “pitfalls educators face when discussing moral and civic values in a society as strongly pluralist as ours” (pp.14-–15). These authors also persuasively explain why they refer to both moral and civic values, development, and education (pp.15-–17). For purposes of this article, the sought-after values are defined by what they are not: neither self-interest nor instrumental individualism.
It is important to note that the entire educational and economic systems are faulted in these radical critiques, with management education considered only a part of a much larger problem. Consequently, a fundamental paradigm shift is called for (Alvesson and Willmott 1992; Clegg and Palmer 1996; Parker 1998).
Although atmosphere might be thought of as tantamount to the hidden curriculum (or the result of the gaps between hidden and overt), I distinguish these two contexts from one another for several reasons. First, the educational atmosphere can exist apart from the educative efforts of the school, that is, the context can support citizenship efforts even if the topic is not addressed formally. Second, in analyzing the atmosphere there are no tacit messages to decipher and no gaps to diminish, thus making this educational context more straightforward than that of the hidden curriculum. And third, the term hidden can have pejorative connotations that may hinder efforts to address its influence, while ‘atmosphere’ is neither positive nor negative, and therefore can be more easily assessed.
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Boyle, ME. Learning to Neighbor? Service-learning in Context. J Acad Ethics 5, 85–104 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-007-9045-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-007-9045-5