Meghan Doran (Simmons Community Engagement), Sarah Arena (Harvard University), and I have a new article in the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. The paper is titled “Perspectives of Community Partner Organizations in the Development of Ethical Service-Learning Guidelines” and it was published in a special issue on “Centering Social Justice in the Scholarship of Community Engagement,” co-edited by Tania D. Mitchell and Tabbye Chavous.
Here is the abstract
This research brings the voices of community partner organizations into the discussion of ethical obligations of university and student partners in community-based learning. We used a framework for service-learning ethics developed by Wendler (2012), which brings The Belmont Report (1979) on research ethics together with decolonizing, feminist, and participatory action research frameworks, to guide our interviews with staff members of community organizations about their experiences and beliefs about the ethical obligations of faculty and students partnering with service-learning courses. We found that the community organization perspective deepened our understanding of the categories elaborated in the Wendler framework (i.e., respect, reflexivity, beneficence, and justice) and situated them in relationship to one another as context, process, and outcome. Based on these findings, we introduce a relational approach to service-learning ethics that centers social justice, and we offer seven key principles to reflect the perspectives of community partners in our ethical practice.
The full paper for download can be accessed freely online from the journal’s website.