Citizenship Service Learning: becoming citizens by assisting immigrants.

Citizenship Service Learning (CSL) serves to reinforce the strengths inherent in the traditional principles of higher education while concurrently transcending its limitations. CSL principles are celebrated on two grounds. The first is pedagogical. Following liberal arts traditionalists, CSL adheres to the classroom as a site for developing cognitive skills through accumulating information and learning research methods. It then stretches the learning process into the civic arena, where students gain tools in problem solving, critical thinking, leadership, and team work through the experience of working with immigrants.

CSL establishes the educational value of what William Kilpatrick (1918) refers to as the "Project Method," education centered around multifaceted, real-world problems, as opposed to compartmentalized subject matter. Through this pedagogic process, CSL coheres cross-disciplinary service learning (see Stember 1991) around a common programmatic theme, the process of gaining citizenship.

Second, CSL's view of citizenship accounts for and then transcends the formal view of legal-status citizenship. Legal-status citizenship provides an individual with full membership in the political community, access to equal voting, holding office, unencumbered travel abroad, and entitlement to scarce public resources. CSL transcends this ostensibly passive, rights-oriented citizenship for an active, community-centered citizenship. As community membership and class grades come to rely on the students' performance, students become stakeholders in the classroom and civic process beyond.(1)

The two virtues that have been claimed for CSL are related. Scholars from Alexis de Toqueville to Benjamin Barber have claimed that education should serve as a training ground for citizenship. At issue is the type of education and citizenship that results: a traditional pedagogy that trains students for a type of citizenship that is passive, demanding no specific proactive behavior on the part of students or citizens, or one that encourages and provides tools for proactive involvement. Following de Toqueville, and Barber, CSL encourages pedagogy for civic involvement.

I devote this article to a discussion of CSL. The article outlines the fundamental characteristics of CSL, a pedagogic model of CSL currently implemented at one college in New England, and discusses and assesses the role and benefits of a CSL program.(2)

Citizenship Service Learning

CSL trains young people in the ways of the self- and socially-creative intentional public being (Wright 1989; see also Becker and Couto 1996; May and Koulish 1998). Students gain the tools for effective public involvement in the process of preparing immigrants for legal-status citizenship. They develop the skills of citizenship by conceptualizing different CSL projects, designing and managing projects, planning activities, delegating responsibilities, communicating with peers and the media, reaching out to multicultural immigrant communities to organize events along with community-based organizations (CBOs), and engaging immigrants in dialogue about citizenship (Farr 1997). Students also develop a better sense of their own identities through contact with immigrants, often filling gaps in their own biographies. All that occurs while students receive course credit, and become more marketable with the skills they have just gained.