Feminine and Feminist Ethics and Service-Learning Site Selection: The Role of Empathy

Abstract

Service-learning has emerged over the past forty or so years as a staple of higher education pedagogy within many disciplines. In that time, scholars and practitioners have argued that the model provides a wide range of benefits to students, communities, and institutions. Consistent among these claims is that participating in service-learning helps students develop empathy for their fellow human beings (Brown 853–54, 859, 861, 863; Davis and White 87; Einfeld and Collins 102, 103, 105; Wilson 210, 213–15). Generally, when service-learning scholars describe empathy, they refer to an ideal disposition of perceiving and relating to populations whom students serve based on identification rather than apathy or sympathy. The idea is that by learning about and sometimes sharing in the experiences of people served by various nonprofits and other service-learning site organizations, students will experience deeper learning that will apply beyond the immediate course context and encourage them to be better people and citizens, as well as, perhaps, better teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, scientists, poets, and engineers. In a 2011 article, Judy C. Wilson summarized much of the research on servicelearning and empathy and described her study exploring the impact of servicelearning experiences as demonstrated by the level of empathy expressed by students in end-of-course reflective letters. According to Wilson’s findings, “students involved in the service-learning assignment were significantly (p < 0.05) more likely to express empathy in their reflective writing than the students who did not participate in service-learning” (207). Wilson ended the article by calling for much more research on the topic, including studies that not only explore what kinds of experiences promote empathy in students, but also ask “what contributes to students’ decisions to participate (or not participate) in SL” (217). In this article we respond to that call, but we also ask other questions with significant implications for the feminist teacher: What dangers or risks might be associated with encouraging students to develop empathy for those they work with in service-learning courses? And how do the empathy and shared experiences that students bring with them to Feminine and Feminist Ethics and Service-Learning Site Selection: The Role of Empathy