Possibility and Process in Post Secondary Service Work: Constructing a Critical Pedagogy of Service
This project examines the worth, experience, and process of post-secondary faculty service work. Service represents a third of the trifurcated, traditional understanding of a professor’s work; however, universities and faculty frequently value service less than teaching and research. After examining commonly held attitudes towards service and exploring the importance of service work to a university’s success and a faculty member’s professional and personal fulfillment, this project places pedagogy in conversation with service to argue that—just as teaching and research necessitate training and thoughtful methodological approaches—service requires philosophical foundations and principled practices to guide faculty in conducting and assessing service. This project combines a qualitative research approach, narrative inquiry, with a philosophical approach to theorize what a pedagogy of service might entail. This project works from critical pedagogy for the classroom to begin constructing epistemological understandings of a critical pedagogy of service. After defining narrative inquiry and explicating how it functions as a methodology for a critical pedagogy of service, interview excerpts presented in narrative and poem form are utilized to contrast negative, life alienating and positive, life-affirming service experiences to reveal the potential of service and begin identifying elements of a critical pedagogy of service. Four tenured English professors with documented records of equity and social justice work were interviewed, and substantial transcript excerpts are included in this project so that readers may participate in the analysis provided and also add to the analysis and theorizing by dialoguing about the transcripts with peers. As with critical pedagogy for the classroom, dialogue, collaborative learning, and institutional change within the context of social justice and equity are driving forces in developing a critical pedagogy of service. This project identifies inquiry based on dialogue and solidarity as the foundation of a critical pedagogy of service. Next, power dynamics within service are explored through the four interviewees’ narratives. Particular attention is paid to oppressive power dynamics and faculty service that uses power with and for colleagues in life-affirming ways. This project concludes by identifying graduate education as a potential beginning site for changing the culture and rhetoric of faculty service in post-secondary education.
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