| The Student Track Student Voices: Making Ourselves Heard By Jenny Elsa Blau, 2002 Swearer Award Winner and recent graduate of Bates College
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Borrowing a term coined by one of the keynote speakers, Ernesto J. Cortés, Jr., the students who attended the Campus Compact National Summit engaged in three days of “real conversation.” We found that unless we create both the space for real conversations and the processes by which these conversations materialize, our work as active agents for change will disintegrate before it has the chance to become sustainable. Representing divergent political, educational, and geographical divergences, we introduced ourselves by sharing our initial attractions to service-learning and our motivations for continued practice. One student remarked that service-learning in the pursuit of social justice was not an obligation but a personal and collective responsibility. We challenged each other with questions about what “counts” as civic engagement and when service is merely charity by attempting to differentiate between holding a door for someone and tutoring a disadvantaged child. One student argued that when an action is attached to a larger vision of a just society, then any act furthering this vision contributes to social justice. In contrast, service-learning requires examining the connections we are trying to make within the larger historical, social and political contexts. It requires more than simply action or thought. The most critical development that ignited our transformational dialogues occurred during our second day at the Summit, when we first joined the rest of the conference participants. Our first day together gave us grandiose sense of our own authority on service-learning, and as we navigated through our second day, it was incredibly challenging to face the perceived de-valuation and disenfranchisement of being “just” a student. Our utopic experience, governed by respectful and sensitive explorations of each other’s knowledge, suddenly turned into a methodological struggle to find the best strategy to get our voices heard. Our highly individualized approaches, ranging from conscious listening to assertive articulations, were ultimately validated by recognizing that our presence represented the initiation of student voices into the discourse. It was our job to discover how we, both individually and collectively, could best use this space to express our thoughts and opinions. Reuniting at the end of the day, we critically examined our individual and collective roles as agents for social change. We tried to answer the question: What can we do to make ourselves heard? Is it better to plan how to approach these types of structured situations, or is it more important to act instinctively and create change in the moment? The dialogue bounced back and forth between the need for researched theory first and action second, and vice versa. The conversation took a sudden and critical twist when a woman of color expressed her disappointment and personal unease with the lack of diversity represented by the selected students and conference participants. Learning that the majority of highly engaged service-learning students in the United States are white women, we decided to confront head-on some of the most crucial issues facing the social reality we work so hard to transform. As a result of this student’s honesty, we began probing each other’s backgrounds along the lines of difference to see who could claim to represent diversity in terms of class, color, race, ethnicity, gender, age, or experience. We began to uproot the complexity of the term “diversity” by transcending the definition of racial categories. One woman said, “You can look at me and see my skin, or my clothes, but you have no idea I grew up extremely poor,” while a male student shared, “Looking at me, you might never know I have sisters who are Hispanic and a family representing all shades of the spectrum.” Some spoke with authority on social disadvantage from their experiences, while others sat silently either immobilized by guilt or internally questioning their right to speak because of their background of racial, economic, or other social privilege. And although I wish I could say we did not jump to conclusions based on physical appearances or dress, we did, and it was important that we did. We defensively repudiated these imposed classifications by sharing personal identities invisible to the human eye. We began to understand what it takes to get at the real issues that bother us so much, which I suspect are the same inequities that keep us deeply engaged in service-learning and social activism. As we each became a point of raw exposure, it was clear that opening our space to honest testimony required an uncompromising commitment to examining the problems in depth rather than relying on easy or temporary solutions. As one student said, “Committing a chunk of our lives to the civic good means more than extra work. It means giving deep thought as to how best to use our energy, time, and talents.” It became obvious that our ability to embrace conflict and contradiction was imperative as a critical step in reaffirming our commitment to pursue new ways to challenge current politics, boundaries, and difference. Understanding that change requires a reflective space for oppositional thinking and learning is vital. As one woman reflected, “One of the things… important for the success of the movement is for people involved to feel empowered and connected, and that there is hope for change.” I challenge not only the students to push toward having more of these “real conversations,” but also those working with students, communities, and academic institutions to recognize that unless we all begin to collaborate as colleagues, we will not realize the true potential for change. |