This chapter describes a multidisciplinary faculty self-study about reciprocity in service-learning.The study began with each co-author participating in a Decoding interview. We describe how Decoding combined with collaborative self-study had a positive impact on our teaching practice. The experience of this group of students and their professors, two co-authors of this chapter, is all too common and not an isolated incident. This is not surprising given that it has been argued that "service learning pedagogy requires and fosters learning-often transformational, paradigm-shifting learning-on the part of everyone involved, including faculty" (Clayton, Bringle & Hatcher 2013, 245). Indeed, given that service-learning necessitates faculty giving up control and working reciprocally with partners, sometimes much more than bridges need to be shifted and changed. Recognizing this, and due to our commitment to developing our teaching practice, we, the authors of this article, set out to investigate our own thinking with regard to reciprocity through a collaborative self-study, which included the use of a Decoding interview (Pace & Middendorf 2004).
Building Bridges from the Decoding Interview to Teaching PracticeOur initial research examined how the Decoding interview followed by our self-study process generated learning about reciprocity specifically (Miller-Young, Dean, Rathburn, Pettit, Underwood, Gleeson, Lexier, Calvert, and Clayton 2015). In this chapter we report how Decoding had an impact on four areas of our teaching practice: 1) our identity and role as teachers, especially in an experiential learning setting; 2) the discovery of similarities and differences we shared with colleagues from diverse disciplines; 3) new strategies for forging meaningful and truly reciprocal relationships with partners in global service-learning field schools; and finally, 4) our design, delivery and assessment in field schools.
Background and Methodology