The Learning of International Service-Learning: Student Reflections Several Years Out

What do students learn through international service-learning? This chapter provides four student reflections about the Nicaragua Service-Learning Experience (NSLE), Ohio State University’s first international service-learning program. The NSLE began in 2002 as an overdue response to a vision that Monimbó community activist Carlos Centeno and I had had during my 1990–1991 dissertation fieldwork. Rapid urbanization had rendered the indigenous character of the neighborhood all but invisible, and modernizing rhetoric had disparaged the indigenous knowledge and communal practices of traditional house building. We dreamed of building a house, not for anyone to live in, but to activate that knowledge and reenact those values. Beyond any practical uses it might have, it would stand as a testament to the indigenous character of the community. Returning to the neighborhood in 2001 with the connections to university resources of a tenure-track professor, I was anxious both to “give back” and to mine the pedagogic potential of this unique community that I loved. Thus, the first iteration of the NSLE emerged, a reverse development project, where indigenous builders taught North American students how to construct a traditional, thatch-roofed house. We repeated the experience in 2004, inviting students in the tourism program at a local university to join us.