I. Introduction
Thank you for inviting me to be with you for this 5th triennial conference of CUAC. It is a pleasure to reconnect with old friends, and make new ones. I am remembering the inaugural meeting of CUAC, held in Canterbury in late March of 1993. Attendees had come not only from every shire’s end, but from across the globe, for everywhere the British once set their flag, they had also set their Church and their academic institutions.
I looked across the dining room the first night of that conference. There was something different from other international conferences I had attended. What was it? I remember clearly realizing that the difference was that people were not sitting with their countrymen as they usually do. Immediately, naturally, and with no prompting, participants had chosen to sit with someone from across the world, and the conversation was lively, frank and intimate -- as if they were long-lost cousins. Why, I suddenly realized, the Anglican Communion really is a family!
Now we are a family fighting. Time will tell whether we are essentially a healthy family, able to disagree but in the end forgive and respect each other and accommodate differences. I commend Don Thompson and the conference committee for insisting that at this time in our history and life as a Communion, CUAC meet. Blessed are the peacemakers!
A brief story from American history. Our 6th president, John Quincy Adams, after serving in the White House, was elected for 8 successive terms to the US House of Representatives. He was a bitter opponent of slavery, but at that period of US history the abolitionist movement was weak. Yet each year for seventeen years between 1831 and 1848, JQ Adams rose to the floor of Congress and made an impassioned speech against slavery. "A doddering old fool," said many as they laughed and turned away. But today, and I am sure for as long as there is a United States of America, John Quincy Adams will be remembered--and honored—as one who resolutely kept the issue of and hope for abolition alive.
It is not too much of a stretch to believe that CUAC might be the JQ Adams of the Anglican Church in the years ahead, by holding its meetings, its continuing to work together, its commitment as institutions of higher learning to freedom of inquiry, and its steadfast refusal to be torn asunder.
As I have examined the Christian faith and belief and read the gospels over the years, I find that one of my "rocks" --a conviction upon which I have chosen, so to speak, to build my house--is that God made us, the human family, for communion. He wants us to be together. There is so much in our world today and in our beloved Church that speaks otherwise. Nationalism, tribalism, race, gender and sexual orientation issues, economic and social class, and, especially sadly, religion tear us apart. It often seems that Samuel Huntington is right—that there will be an Armageddon, a catastrophic clash of civilizations.
But I would hold that our Christian heritage suggests that another way of relating is possible, --difficult but possible.Your coming to a conference entitled "Learning from Each Other’s Living," suggests that you agree with me on this point.
Further, I believe that the gift to the world of the Anglican Communion-- our mission and purpose to which all our history points-- is our model of governance which respects diversity and allows local use. Knit together as seekers, we are a family united not so much by doctrine, nor by submission to a hierarchical authority, but by common prayer. We kneel together to ask forgiveness, to make petition for the world, to declare our needs, and we stand together in praise. Here we are in England where Celtic and Roman Christianity made an accommodation, where both could thrive and each could minister as the spiritual needs of successive generations required. We are all the richer for the existence of both traditions.
II. Description of Service-Learning
I have been invited to talk this evening about a new pedagogy for higher education, one which gives concrete programmatic expression to--makes incarnate--our Christian beliefs and heritage, our Anglican mission and our mission as institutions of higher education My topic is Service-learning, where, in the words of the psalms, " truth and peace may kiss each other."
I begin with an explanation and definition. When educators begin using the phrase service-learning some 25 years ago—Sinclair Goodlad used the phrase study-service—very few had any idea what it meant. In fact the first service-learning conferences sponsored by the International Partnership for Service-Learning presented us with interesting problems. I remember calling a registrant from the US Military Academy at West Point, exploring whether he really wanted to attend. He thought service-learning referred to Armed services. Another registered from the General Motors automobile headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, believing that service-learning referred to the service economy. Then as the decade of the 80s wore on, service-learning became more widely known and understood and those who used the phrase tended to use it as I will tonight. But with the explosive growth of service-learning in the last decade, we have found its definition has again become less precise. People now use the phrase to refer to almost anything that involves some kind of volunteer or community service.
As I will use the phrase, service-learning is the union-- the wedding--of academic study and community service. Not service alone, from which the participant learns but informally, without academic credit, and essentially undirected, but united with formal study in such a way that the service makes the study immediate and relevant and the study informs the service. Service made one with the academic mission of the university, just as the laboratory is to science; field observation is to anthropology; the studio is to art; and the hospital internship is to medicine.
One way of thinking of service-learning is that just as books, journals, and reports, classroom lectures, discussions, the internet, the library, films, interviews, and case studies are sources of information and ideas, so is the experience of service. Just as the information gleaned from traditional means of schooling—the books, the lectures—must be critically examined, so the experience of service must be analyzed, ordered and questioned. In service-learning programs, the service and academic study may be mutually reinforcing or one may challenge the other.
Let me give you two examples. In Jamaica, a student posed this question to the teacher. He said: "I read an article in a journal about changing family patterns in Jamaica, but in the child care agency where I am working I am seeing something very different." The teacher then asked him a series of questions: "When was the article published ?, What population was studied?, Was the population at the agency too small to be representative, or perhaps the agency clients were a kind of subset of the larger culture? These are all good academic questions, leading the student to greater specificity, greater precision, and a greater sense of complexity.
The other example comes from here in England, where Partnership for Service-Learning students study the history of the social welfare state. In the classroom, at Roehampton University, (of which CUAC member Whitelands College is a part) they learn of the origins of the social welfare state,, the labor movement, more recent developments such as those under Margaret Thatcher, and the issues of the present. In the service agency where they are volunteering, they hear from their supervisor and from those whom the agency serves both the pros and the cons of the system. In their own assessment, they must weigh what might be called the macro-issues they learn about in class and the micro-issues they see in the agency.
How is this different from the traditional practicum, in which a student learns his chosen career through the experience of practical training? There are two important distinctions. First, the service is performed in locations usually not used or at least not sought after in traditional internships. Instead of being in the most prestigious and upper-class schools, practice teaching is carried out in schools for the underprivileged, in the crowded immigrant neighborhoods of the inner city or the dusty and forgotten villages. Colleges of education are recognizing that success in these locations is a greater measure of the would-be teachers potential than in schools where by reason of family and school resources pupils already have a distinct advantage. Similarly, students in business curricula are being sent to locations where training workers, managing efficiently and balancing a budget are more difficult than in already successful companies.
The second way in which educators around the world are articulating the difference between service-learning and the traditional internship lies in the very purpose and expected outcomes of the practical experience. The internship focuses almost exclusively on what the student learns, and it is generally career related; service-learning claims to be transforming for any student regardless of her future plans. Furthermore, service-learning is equally concerned with the benefit to the community and service organization.
III. Value of Service-Learning
Why this new pedagogy? Why now? Why make this a feature of this
CUAC conference? Service-learning addresses three crucial problems of teaching and learning:
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First, around the world I hear educators deploring the passivity of students, and seeking means of teaching that encourage deep and lasting learning. It was this potential that first attracted me to service-learning. As a teacher of history, I had tried everything. I had gotten slides from the National Portrait Gallery, I had told human-interest stories, I had tried having students speculate on what would have developed if instead of A, there had been B—(for example, What if George Washington was granted rather than denied a commission in the Royal Navy?) But still, I had to admit that for most students, history was about "old, boring, dead, white men." Students were mystified by the religious convictions that had caused men and women in the 16th and 17th centuries to lay down their lives. They certainly made no connection to the fact that, for good or ill, people are today laying down their lives for what they believe.
Teachers in virtually every discipline—except perhaps astrophysics and pure mathematics are finding as I have that, connected to service, the information, theoretical constructs, and methodology of a discipline take on new meaning, becoming memorable and usable.
Let me give you a somewhat esoteric example—an extreme case but as an example of what happens when substantive service is a co-requisite for an academic course of study. I will use an area of interest to me, Renaissance and Reformation history. Now in traditional study, I as teacher would have started with the characteristics of the waning middle ages, the increased trade with what we now call the middle east, the growth of the city states in Italy, the challenges to Church authority, the increasing rigidity of Rome, the move to the northern countries of Europe and finally the reformers and the wars of nationalism. Students would read Jacob Burkhardt, and be asked to consider the questions, Was there really a renaissance or was it just Burkhardt’s invention, and, if there was a renaissance, when did it begin?
Well, I love this stuff, but I must recognize that the students don’t particularly. They are engaged in exploring New York and the issues of our day.
Imagine if they were all engaged in substantive volunteer service—in areas that really interest them. One might be tutoring in an inner city school, another working for an activist and sometimes law-breaking environmental group, another as a docent at the Museum of Modern Art, another as a volunteer with the Human Rights Commission of the UN, another for an organization called the Partnership for a Drug-/Free America, and another at a home for mostly Jewish elderly, with their memories of the Second World War.
Is there any way to use their various experiences and interests to enliven their study of Renaissance and Reformation history? The question forces me, the teacher, to start at the beginning. I asked myself and the students, What did the people of the late middle ages, the renaissance, the reformation believe is the nature of humankind? What a piece of work is man? – depraved, ignorant, or with unlimited potential? "What", I then asked the students, "do the people with whom you work and serve believe is the nature of humankind? Is belief about yourself a determinant of what you will become? What does this say about the Renaissance, the Reformation, the poor child in inner city New York, the ability to self regulate our use of natural resources, the human ability to overcome an addiction?
And if what we believe about ourselves is important, equally so is what others believe about us? Women in the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the mothers of Harlem, the women of concern to the UN Human Rights Commission? What does modern art or the holocaust suggest is the nature of human relationships? Are we loved by God, saved by grace, or are we valued only for what we produce?
And who are the authorities –the Pope, the priests, the laity, the scriptures, the teacher, the policeman, the donors, international bodies of the United Nations, the most powerful nation, the law?
Who in the past and in the present are the revolutionaries and the counter revolutionaries?
You get my slant. The questions of an era long past are nonetheless the questions of our own. The answers may be surprisingly the same or wildly different. But they are living questions that inform our reflections on past, present and future.
Let me give you simpler example: one service-learning student, asked what she had learned from her program in a developing country, replied, " I learned that at the end of a decision by the International Monetary Fund is a hungry child named Tracy." Her study of international economics was made living and real, and therefore deep and lasting, because it helped her understand the plight of a child whom she taught and had come to know and love.
(If we had time, I would ask each of you to think of your own discipline, and go back to its most basic questions, and see how they apply to your discipline or field, and how they might be examined through a service assignment. But I hope, even without this exercise I have convinced you that academic study wedded to service enlivens and makes memorable the learning.)
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A second reason for the value of connecting service to learning is that it is almost always intercultural in nature. We understand that clearly when a student goes from one nation to another to study and serve. But it is also true if practiced locally. When a young and healthy student enters the world of the ill or elderly, he is entering a new culture where the values, assumptions, meaning and very purpose of living are not his own. The student in the home for the aged is taken aback when a resident says she wants to die, the student often responds, "Oh, no you don’t." "But I do," is the rejoinder. It may be a struggle for the student, but eventually he will learn that his own assumptions are not everybody’s. He is learning from another’s, is this case longer, living.
The university student teaching literacy, the affluent working with the poor, the "majority student " working with a minority population or tribal group, all of these require this move to enter vicariously the experience of those different from themselves.
Here, I pause to remind us all that these two educational goals—making learning active, useful and applicable, and entering the mindset of others different from ourselves, lie at the heart and soul of our academic mission. The reason we study history, political science, economics, sociology, languages, philosophy, religion, and, yes, business and law and medicine and engineering is first that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Humans have a special ability to learn from the experience of others. (Imagine if I had had to figure out that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of squares of the sides. Oh, my!)
We can build knowledge on the knowledge, experience, and reflection of those who have gone before. We can use what they have learned, whether that is in building bridges or understanding the loneliness and fear of the young girl pregnant out of wedlock, or in deciding how to vote. So when we talk of service-learning as enlivening learning and making it useful and applicable and relevant, we are reiterating the age-old values of the higher learning.
And so it is with the second value I and others assign to service-learning. It is a cliché to say that we live in an intercultural world, The president of the Ford Foundation put it this way—"The world is our neighborhood and that world is in our neighborhood."
We often cite this reality of our lives as creating problems for us, but of course it brings riches as well. Review in your mind the periods of great creativity, discovery and advancement in the history of the world. Can you name a one that was not preceded or accompanied by the stimulus from the influx of ideas from beyond the center? Certainly the Renaissance in Europe, to which we referred earlier was such a time—increased trade with the middle east, the contact with Moorish and Jewish culture, the manuscripts brought back with trading ships led directly to the little town and church at Herne, near Canterbury, where the vernacular was first used in the service of worship, opening the doors not only to our Anglican belief in the accessibility of spiritual knowledge by a few but by all, and our very profession as teachers, scholars, researchers. How much of what we value as a Church and as societies stemmed from the interaction of trade between Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East.
As colleges and universities, we are obliged—yes, obliged---to do all in our power to help students learn from those different from themselves, welcoming the opportunity to learn about new ideas, new ways of relating, new values, new assumptions. Their impulse, as ours, may be to turn away and inward, shunning the different, and retreating into what today’s students call the comfort zone. But if we let them do that, we are betraying our profession as educators. Which calls us to widen horizons—ours and theirs.
But, I would claim, drawing on the tradition both of Plato and of Jesus, we are called to do more. We are called to ennoble our students, encouraging them to set out on what Joseph Campbell identified as the hero’s journey, in search of the boon-- the good-- which the young student/seeker/ hero can then return to the society.
The boon may be a discovery --Prometheus retrieving fire for the use of mankind-- but it may be in the questioning and developing of values, not in the abstract but rather within the context of community. Archbishop Tutu says, "In Africa we say that a person is made a person through other persons. We are made human through fellowship." What we value, believe in, commit ourselves to, should be examined not in splendid isolation, but as part of a body. The church has taught us that there can be no health in one member, if there is disease, corruption in another part. We were made for communion.
My experience with international and intercultural service-learning is that it almost invariably creates an climate where mutual respect and affection grow between the students and those they have come to serve. The esteem one for another develops not from abstract ideology but from the daily encounters, and is therefore received as real. Students see the struggles of those entrapped by poverty, of the ill or disabled, of those denied access to education, and of the marginalized, and what they almost always also see is bravery, resourcefulness, kindness, forgiveness, steadfastness and, yes, even joy. From their engagement comes a level of respect that no classroom—and I would add without apology no sermon--- can alone generate. But the experience, together with academic study of the culture and the foundation for understanding our human condition and human relationships which the church provides, sets up the conditions by which students reach their own conclusions about the meaning and purpose of life in general and their own in particular. If they are of traditional age, this is appropriate as they move from the dependence of childhood to the autonomy of adulthood.
We have talked about the value of uniting academic study and community service for students—enlivening and deepening their study, immersing them in cultures not their own , and helping them to define their own values, beliefs and purpose within the context of community. We should now touch briefly on two other values.
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Service-learning sets academic institutions into a new relationship to the community that supports them. Directing some of its resources including the expertise of faculty to the needs of the community creates a climate of partnership and good will.
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And, after all is said and done, the students leave behind something good. As one student put it, " I learned that I cannot alone change the economy of Latin America, but in my semester of service-learning I taught four children to read." And when they come home, they bring their knowledge and empathy and their increased maturity to their families, schools and communities. Time and again, both parents and university teachers attest to the maturing that occurs with serious and substantive service-learning, noting the increased sense of purpose students show to their academic studies, and their caring and responsible leadership.
IV. Anglican Colleges
Having talked about service-learning, what it is and why it is of value, I want to turn now to Anglican colleges and universities and to CUAC. I begin with a story about a meeting in which I participated some years ago. It was not a CUAC meeting, but an international organization that included church-related colleges and universities mostly across Asia. We were in small groups talking about the meaning and purpose of these institutions of higher education. One man, in his 50s, a graduate of a distinguished church related institution in Asia, said wistfully, "When I was a young man, the church-related colleges and universities in my country were on the cutting edge of most important issues—we looked to them for leadership—but now so many are seen as middle-of –the- road, undistinguished and indistinguishable from other mediocre schools."
As he spoke, I was thinking of the colleges in India that had admitted those of the untouchable caste; of young Evelyn Wright in the United States going from town to town until she found a place that would accept the school for former slaves she planned to establish, now Voorhees College. I thought of the English colleges, founded to provide teachers for the children who labored under appalling conditions in the factories; thought of the women’s colleges in India and Japan; of Cuttington University carved out of the bush in West Africa; of Trinity College in the Philippines founded to serve those who fled the communist guerilla war in Northern Luzon; and of Church Teachers College in Jamaica where, for lack of teachers, only one or two of fourteen parishes had compulsory education even at the primary level.
I thought of the great church colleges of St. John’s and St. Mary’s in Shanghai that were to be reborn in Taiwan after the exodus from Communist China in 1949. I thought of St. Stephen’s Delhi, where the Cambridge Mission to India sent C. F. Andrews who upon his arrival took the position of Deputy Principal because, in his words, he found Mr. Rudra, an Indian, ever so much more qualified to be Principal, thereby establishing a heretofore unknown hierarchy in Anglo-Indian relationships.
I could go on. Virtually every Anglican college was once on the cutting edge of issues of justice and opportunity. It is your noble and goodly heritage.
But, are we, each in our own place, still fulfilling the mission to which we arecalled? Or did the adjectives of the gentleman I quoted earlier-- "undistinguished and indistinguishable"-- sting?
What I am here to suggest is that instead of comparing ourselves to the secular institutions and worrying so much about our ratings, shouldn’t
Anglican colleges be asking, as did their founders, what are they called to be in this world, what is our present ministry, and then bravely set about doing so. I have chosen as my life’s work the development of service-learning, because I believe that each of you in your various locations and conditions will find a version of service-learning that answers this question.
What if you said that above all other needs, none is greater than that of providing the world with a new kind of leader, one knowledgeable about and comfortable with those whose beliefs and values are very different, who can work cooperatively to negotiate peaceful solutions, who sees human suffering and can address with energy, imagination, and intelligence the needs of even the weakest and most marginalized. What if you made that your goal?
What if, instead of providing a means of "up and out" for a few, you fostered in those few privileged to be educated by you, a sense of responsibility and unity with those left out of higher education? What if your graduates believed we were made for communion?
What if the people in the communities near your institution began to see your Anglican college in a different light as on the cutting edge of social issues, just as they once saw those Indian colleges that admitted untouchables?
Now, I promised you a little bit of physics, not much because the truth is I don’t know very much. But there are some modern understandings that can serve to challenge our notion of what is needed.
You will recognize the concept. From Eduard Lorenz came what has become known as the butterfly effect, more formally in chaos theory Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions or SDIC. The idea that small variations in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can produce long term behavioural changes in the system, that the butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong can produce a hurricane in the Atlantic.
If your institution is dynamic—that is living and changing --- SDIC suggests that making small changes may in fact transform the system. In my initial description and remarks about service-learning, I suggested that service-learning may be a new pedagogy but it fulfills the age-old mission of higher education in helping students enter the mindset of another, and in the purpose of providing the society with responsible and caring leaders.. Further, it points to the most important and fundamental questions of the disciplines, reinforcing them, and making them useful. Far from weakening traditional study, service- learning enlivens it. Reassure your faculty, students still must read books, write papers, and come to class. But with service-learning they bring something new which they and the teacher can use to develop academic skills and add to the store of knowledge.
In the scheme of things, service-learning may be that small initial change—a mere butterfly—which can transform, and strengthen, yes, and resurrect.
Imagine your college or university, having added service-learning, finding as has Trinity college in the Philippines, a small and somewhat poor college by Philippine standards, that it is famous throughout the nation and region for its academic excellence and service to the community. By embracing the theory and practice of service-learning,Trinity College faculty have been recognized as experts, invited to speak at colleges and universities throughout Asia. I commend this Anglican college for its courage and leadership, seeking to fulfill the vision of its founders. It truly is, as its motto proclaims, "making persons for others." It has become known as a cutting edge institution in the arena of justice and service as well as academic excellence. And the academic quality has been enhanced by the opportunities made available to its faculty through service-learning, by the visitors from abroad who have come to experience service-learning at Trinity.
V. CUAC as the Tipping Point
But, of course, not all butterflies create hurricanes. It is not a matter of chance, but of other conditions which either snuff out the power of the small pair of flapping wings or which reinforce those small gusts of wind.
These conditions, which have been identified, analyzed,and named by such researchers as Malcolm Gladwell, have to be present to create a hurricane.
One condition necessary in the development of social movements—and that includes education—is common purpose. Another is organizational structure. Here, often cited is the comparison of George Whitfield and John Wesley. Both were powerful preachers, but only one created the organizational structure—the Methodist Church-- that could sustain and strengthen the ministry.
Another condition is that of flexibility or adaptation to local conditions. Here the Benedictines are instructive. An organization true to its principles—the Benedictine rule—has lasted for 1500 years through remarkable change because it has allowed for local usage, and retained local control of the chapters.
All of this sounds rather Anglican to me.
Closely tied to the concept of Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions is that of the tipping point., when a critical mass is reached that produces the major impact,the perfect storm. The naturalist Lyall Watson, called this "the hundredth monkey". A few isolated examples rarely produce significant change. Only when a critical mass is achieved—bacteria producing an epidemic, consumers creating a world-wide market for a product, a religious leader gaining a noticeable following—will significant change occur.
And that brings me to CUAC as the tipping point.
Could it be that Anglican colleges and universities, in their array of colors, sizes, shapes and habits, but sharing a common foundation in the Anglican Church and with a common commitment to learn from each other’s living, dedicated to service and academic excellence, and seeing as their mission the development of graduates with the skill and values to be caring leaders….
Could they, flapping the wings of service-learning each in a different corner of the globe and each in a way that suits local conditions, create not only the initial conditions for major change but together—all 120 CUAC institutions -- be the tipping point for major change in higher education, change that redirects higher education to its historic purpose of providing servant-leaders. One that follows the trajectory of our rabbi, who when asked the abstract questions about eternal life answered with the parable of the Samaritan —a call to action, a call to use one’s resources for the needy, a call to serve.
The initial conditions are there—at Trinity college of Quezon City, at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, at Cuttington University in Liberia, in the leadership of Samuel Sudanandha and Nirmala Jeyeraj, in Roehampton University and Whitelands College and I daresay in the number of other CUAC institutions.
The numbers are there to create a tipping point. The structure is there in CUAC.
More conditions, are needed—a commitment to a multilevel strategic plan, the support of the persuaders including the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops, the activities of the connectors, the mavens, the writers, the donors. The International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership is prepared to assist, to help you fan the winds of change.
Could it be that when the history of the Anglican Church is written in the future, it will say that CUAC—Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion-- formed an international Service-Learning Society, thereby creating young leaders who in their formative years learned that the most important thing is that we learn from each other’s living; that we are made for communion; and who refused to allow the Church to split apart no matter how difficult and thorny the issues; who had learned to understand and care about and appreciate those different from themselves?
And could it be that when the history of higher education in the 21st century is written it will say that learning was reinvigorated; scholarship flourished; and the expertise of faculty and students put to use to address the many social problems experienced by communities around the world; that idealistic students found that learning and serving together form the greatest satisfaction life has to offer? Could it be written that this movement which transformed higher education had its beginnings in colleges and universities around the world, some large, some small, some old and prestigious, others new and struggling, but all having in common historic and present ties to the Anglican communion?
And could it be that when the larger history of the world in the 21st century is written it will be noted that the contribution of higher education, inspired by the example set by these cutting-edge, Anglican Church-related colleges and universities, was to offer a countervailing voice to the values which suggest that power over others and material possession are the highest good, the object of a higher education?
Could it be that history will record these small butterflies, the Anglican colleges and universities, created through their organization of CUAC the tipping point which caused an epidemic in the belief that we should learn from each other’s living, that the human family was made for communion and, through the pedagogy of service-learning, instilled the qualities of leadership that in turn led to the advancing of justice and peace in the 21st century?
Could it possibly be?
