Community Service Learning: Pedagogy at the Interface of Poverty, Inequality and Privilege

Using empirical data from three different community service learning (CSL) courses offered at a South African university, in this paper we discuss the promises and pitfalls of this pedagogy for meaningful change within communities. The paper makes visible the challenging contradictions of CSL as a practice seeking to promote social change and CSL as a form of charity or paternalism. Drawing on in-depth qualitative data collected from interviews with lecturers, focus groups with students involved in CSL and interviews and focus groups with community members who participated in CSL, we examine the interface between poverty, inequality and privilege that occurs when universities and poor communities endeavour to partner. We argue that CSL ought to promote social change through fostering a sense of agency, empowerment, sustainability and capabilities formation amongst students and within communities. However, when CSL course design (and resultant implementation) does not sufficiently take account of the complex relations of power and privilege, particularly in the context of extreme poverty in communities, CSL practice risks undermining the social transformation that it seeks to foster. We draw on the work of Davis and Wells [2016. “Transformation without Paternalism.” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. doi:10.1080/19452829.2016.1145198] to propose procedural principles for democratic CSL design and implementation.