The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning ed. by Randy Stoecker, Elizabeth A. Tryon, Amy Hilgendorf (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning ed. by Randy Stoecker, Elizabeth A. Tryon, Amy Hilgendorf David Dadurka The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning Randy Stoecker, Elizabeth A. Tryon, with Amy Hilgendorf Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2009. 232pp. An extensive field report about community organizations in the greater Madison, WI, region, The Unheard Voices offers a rare look into how charities and nonprofit organizations perceive their service-learning relationships with academic institutions. From the perspective of community partners, the view isn’t always so pleasant. The Unheard Voices fills a frequently ignored gap in service-learning studies and offers long overdue insight from community partners. However, the book’s value is limited by its focus solely on the Madison region, an area known for its community activism and service-learning participation. Despite this limitation, the book is effective at raising awareness about the level of sustained engagement needed by both academics and community partners to create greater reciprocity in service-learning projects. The volume’s editors Randy Stoecker, Elizabeth A. Tryon, and Amy Hilgendorf, all based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, note that despite service learning’s goal of serving community partners, service-learning researchers have generally ignored the perspective of those organizations that academic institutions aim to serve (5). Stoecker, Tryon, and Hilgendorf start with the premise that there are problems inherent with doing service learning from the “perspective of the academy” (viii) and ask the question “Who is served by service learning?” (1). Using responses from sixty-seven interviews with staff of community organizations in the greater Madison region, the authors’ results suggest that higher education institutions appear to reap more of the rewards of service-learning partnerships than community organizations. The book itself emerges from a service-learning project, born of a graduate seminar on qualitative research in which both graduate and undergraduate students—with a wide range of backgrounds in nonprofit work—contributed to the majority of the book chapters. This model itself suggests what service-learning practitioners might [End Page 84] undertake in their communities to improve the effectiveness of service projects, and it represents one of the greatest strengths of the book. The first half of the book (chapters one through five) is devoted to understanding the problems with service-learning relationships, the motivations that drive community organizations to participate in service learning, how they engage in partnerships and manage service learners. The second half (chapters six through ten) develops responses to address the problems that drive community partners away from service-learning partnerships. In chapter one, Stoecker and Tryon highlight the growing concern over the “issue of whether service learning truly serves communities” (3). The authors argue that previous research has been based on “superficial” methods, using focus groups and Likert scale questionnaires to present a rosy picture of community organization and educational institution service-learning relationships (5). They argue that projects, because educational institutions are the main drivers of them, have veered too far to the learning side of service learning, ignoring the service aspects and what benefits the community reaps from such relationships. Stoecker draws on his twenty years of experience to highlight instances of disengaged faculty who sometimes don’t care about the results of unsuccessful community projects, fail to manage service learners, or lack understanding of the needs of their partner organizations or local communities. Chapter two provides an overview of what motivates community organizations to participate in service learning. Authors Shannon Bell and Rebecca Carlson assert four primary reasons community organizations work with service learners: to build capacity, to achieve long-term education goals, to form potentially advantageous relationships with the university community, and to help students better understand their work. While building capacity seems intuitive for community organizations, Bell and Carlson point out that they were “greatly surprised to learn that many community organizations hosted service learners not because it expanded organizational capacity, but because the organizational staff saw it as part of their mission to educate the public” (23). However, Bell and Carlson end the chapter with a quote from a community partner who notes that putting students to work with meaningful, education-focused tasks as opposed to busy work...