Learning to Neighbor? Service-learning in Context

Abstract

Service-learning has received a great deal of attention in the management education literature over the past decade, as a method by which students can acquire moral and civic values as well as gain academic knowledge and practice real-world skills. Scholars focus on student and community impact, curricular design, and rationale. However, the educational environment ("context") in which service-learning occurs has been given less attention, although experienced educators know that the classroom is hardly a vacuum and that students learn a great deal from the non-curricular aspects of their educational experience. Moral values in particular are conveyed by what is not said. Given this, I argue that the contexts in which service-learning takes place are as important as the activity itself. Three perspectives on context will be described and assessed: the "hidden" curriculum, the educational atmosphere, and the university's orientation towards social responsibility.Keywords Hidden curriculum . Moral and civic values . Management education . Service-learning . University social responsibility In Learning to Labour (Willis 1977), an often-taught ethnography of a British secondary school, Paul Willis showed how the educational experience prepared working class lads for working class positions, despite a curriculum designed to help them move away from menial labor. In this situation, the formal curriculum was subverted by a combination of factors in the broader educational environment: the social relations among the boys, the attitudes of the teachers, the social climate of the school, and the students' neighborhood. The lads clearly learned a great deal through their educational experiences, but they did not learn what the curriculum was designed to teach. In fact, they learned the opposite. This

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