The Limits of Service-Learning

Abstract

In this chapter I want to explore in more depth the unacknowledged and unanticipated problematics of service-learning in higher education, particularly as service-learning practice and theory has turned in the last few years to ensuring its institutional longevity. This chapter thus takes a critical look at this attempted institutionalization of service-learning in higher education. It asks whether service-learning can become deeply embedded within the academy, and, if so, what exactly is it that becomes embedded. Specifically, I suggest that there are substantial pedagogical, political, and institutional limits to service-learning across the academy. These limits, moreover, are inherent to the service-learning movement as contemporarily theorized and enacted. As such, there may be a fundamental and unbridgeable gap between the rhetoric and reality of the aspirations of the present-day service-learning movement.