Buttin's work talks about the benefits that service learning has on children where it is present. He says that children Improve in areas including citizenship school work and overall intelligence. This writing begs multiple questions about what service learning is really about. Is it an "Institutuional mechanism fostering student's growth and self awareness? Is it a "philisophical stance committed to the betterment of local and global community?" Butins article can be seen as a clarification of what service learning really is.
Cushman opens by defining public as the middle and upper class policy makers whom tend to omit the local community. I like the quote Cushman sites in his work: "In the next century the intellectual must be willing to take more risks by choosing exile from confining institutional, theoretical, and discursive formations"(Kritzman1124). This means to me that for us to find out what Service Learning really is, we have pull ourselves out of the conventional structure that society places us within at birth. It is difficult if not near impossible to change some of our deepest and most understood ideas of how institutions work with people and their cultures.
O'Grady speaks of Education and how it is "Contested Territory." When she says contested territory she is siting the fact that the government and other factors determine and fight over exactly the material that is taught. She goes on to say that "Service learning is not political." I completely agree because politics forces a person into decision about matters and crafts an automatic response to stimuli. Stimuli being any situation a person is put in where he or she needs to react to a different culture.
These writings made me a little more comfortable thinking about the way I think about and perceive the world around me. I am more and more excited to actually become a more "Multicultural person" because I feel like I will be so much more useful in the world.
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