Abstract
Through its focus on deep and experiential learning, service-learning (SL) has become increasingly popular within the business school curriculum. While a reciprocal dimension has been foundational to SL, the reciprocality that is emphasized in business ethics literature is often on the relationship between the service experience and the academic content, rather than reciprocal learning of the service providers (students) and the recipients (organizations and their managers), let alone other stakeholders. Drawing on the notion of enriched reciprocal learning and on Aristotle’s typology of modes of knowing, we (1) revisit reciprocal learning by illustrating what kinds of learning occur for server and served in four SL projects from a project course in CSR, and (2) emphasize the role of boundary spanners from the project organizations in making this reciprocal learning happen and translating the various types of student learning in ways that are useful for their organizations. We find that when boundary spanners are particularly engaged at making the projects impactful, they contribute to making the learning experiences of students, managers (including themselves) and sometimes other stakeholders useful, multidimensional, and ultimately rewarding.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in responsible management learning (RML) in business organizations (e.g. Hilliard 2013; Laasch and Moosmayer 2015; Nonet et al 2016)
We take seriously the possibility of a strong connection between RME and RML and we focus on learning that occurs in boundary-spanning practices (Jamali 2006; Laasch 2018) between managers and students in service-learning courses organized by business schools
In their critique of the limits of reciprocity in SL literature and practice, Henry and Breyfogle (2006) point out how the set-up in SL is much like a stimulus–response loop in which there are clear binaries between ‘server’ and ‘served’, wherein the educational institution provides a service to a community actor, who in turn provides the context for the experiential learning of the students, and “a circuit is completed when the university offers service received by the [partner], which maintains the [outcome]” (Henry and Breyfogle 2006: 30)
Summary
There has been an increasing interest in responsible management learning (RML) in business organizations (e.g. Hilliard 2013; Laasch and Moosmayer 2015; Nonet et al 2016). The authors stress how inherently difficult it is for reciprocal learning to occur as students struggle to bridge their view of themselves as ‘service providers’ with the concept of ‘partners’ with organizational staff In their critique of the limits of reciprocity in SL literature and practice, Henry and Breyfogle (2006) point out how the set-up in SL is much like a stimulus–response loop in which there are clear binaries between ‘server’ and ‘served’, wherein the educational institution provides a service to a community actor, who in turn provides the context for the experiential learning of the students, and “a circuit is completed when the university offers service received by the [partner], which maintains the [outcome]” (Henry and Breyfogle 2006: 30). While this distinction recognizes the reciprocal nature of learning in and through a variety of community relations, it does not tell us much in terms of what kind of learning can occur in and through reciprocal SL encounters, and this is the question we turn to
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