The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning Book

This book asks difficult questions about service-learning, some of which are unanswerable. There's no good way to reconcile the academic calendar of universities with the K-12 calendar, and still less with the 12-month, never-ending calendar of real life. So if our university semester ends in late April, but a K-12 school has its big science fair or Shakespeare festival in May, undergraduates wind up abandoning the schools (and children who, in many cases, have become attached to them) just when they are needed most. At the same time, undergraduates have responsibilities on campus and at home as well as at the service-learning site, and financial constraints that make it hard for them to stay around after the end of a semester. Similarly, faculty who are budgeted for research and instruction, but not for service and outreach (especially at R1 institutions), find it difficult to commit time that would normally be dedicated to research or to supervising dissertation students to service, when such service will not be weighted in tenure, promotion, and awards decisions. Faculty also run into financial constraints: many are indebted from graduate school and can't take the financial hit of teaching a May/summer class for free when they could be teaching one for pay.