Citation

Parkins I. Rev. Educ. Pedagog. Cult. Stud. 2014; 36(2): 127-143.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/10714413.2014.898539

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In the winter of 2010, as the professor of an introductory Gender Studies course in a Canadian university, author Ilya Parkins was involved in a community service learning project centered on the memorialization of women murdered in her university's local community. In this article, Parkins considers what limited this project, which was so promising in its addressing of a need articulated by a community partner, a local women's organization. She locates in the framework of service learning an incommensurability with the kinds of reflective engagement demanded by an ethical memorial practice. In the context of charges that service learning projects center the experiences and perspectives of the students over the members of communities they work with, she asks, what happens when the community being invoked by a service learning project consists of the dead and those who mourn them? Parkins argues that the project's successful unfolding required that students critically engage with issues of social location, including their own--an inquiry which would complicate the very terms of engagement in service learning: What is community and what is the student's relationship to the people she is working with? In this project in particular, this would require the ongoing incorporation of critical tools for thinking about privilege and its relationship to representation, and it would require an explicit working through of the stakes of memorialization, including its representational stakes. Herein, she engages in a retrospective examination of what worked and what did not work about the project and offers some ideas about how such a service learning undertaking, anchored in strategies of memorialization, might be approached.

Language: en