"Community-Service Pedagogy" Response

I do like the ideals of community service pedagogy. However, I find it slightly idealistic, and as a student I always resented it. I have always felt that serving one’s community should be by choice. If one does not do it with a willing heart, one should not do it. I suppose that in any case it does improve the community, but in my eyes anything done with the wrong heart is done incorrectly. Beyond that, I would like to play devil’s advocate with some of the notions of this pedagogical practice. First, this article claims that community-service-centered courses brought more ‘real’ audiences and purposes. The students are getting a real world experience. My question: how real is this? Are the students going to be making pamphlets for Girl Scouts organizations? Will they be making flyers for soup kitchens after graduation? My guess is no. Most students (as with my own experience) may find some measure of gratification in the helping of others, but when the requirement to help others is removed, the students will cease. Perhaps the only way to instill a sense of community is to change our entire self-centered social values altogether. Moreover, our entire education system would have to focus on the community—not just English class.

One of the arguments of this piece was that community-service pedagogy was not necessarily about community service; specifically, it was not about “charity.” Secondly, it claims that the greatest value of this pedagogy is that it causes students to immerse themselves in the community for with they are writing through research, surveys, and other means. If immersion in the subject or the community is the goal, and the pedagogy is not necessarily concerned with charity, why not just create community-based prompts that force the same involvement without the charity factor? Why not just assign the students to help with the publicity for a fictional local Girl Scouts organization and require the student to do realistic research?

Like I said, I think this sounds like a nice idea, and I really don’t see a great deal of weakness in the idea. I suppose my biggest disagreement is that it seems to completely negate the use of the literary canon (or even non-canonical texts) as well as self-centered writing. In excluding such major composition course components from its discourse, community service pedagogy seems to be extremely exclusive. A teacher who values self-discovery through writing or an awareness of “great” writers of the past would not be permitted to use this pedagogy because that teacher’s values are not even a part of the community service discourse.