Civic Engagement and International Service-Learning Print

Philip Wingeier-Rayo, Pfeiffer University

Philip Wingeier-Rayo is associate professor of religion at Pfeiffer University in Misenheimer, North Carolina. He teaches in the areas of theology, missions, and cultural anthropology. Wingeier-Rayo is the author of Cuban Methodism: The Untold Story of Survival and Revival (Dolphins and Orchids, 2006) and Where are the Poor: An Ethnographic Study of Base Christian Communities and Pentecostalism in Cuernavaca, Mexico (forthcoming from Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2010).

Challenging Assumptions and Encouraging Engagement

While boarding an airplane for Cuba, one of my students turned to me and said that this was her first time on an airplane. Then another said “Me, too,” and yet another, “Same with me.” Not only was this the first time out of the United States for all but one of these nine undergraduate students, but it was the first time on an airplane for three. Right there on the jet-bridge, I whipped out my camera to document this historic occasion. The flight attendant welcomed the first-time fliers onto the plane and even posed for a snapshot. Suddenly I felt a heavier weight of responsibility on my shoulders to chaperone inexperienced travelers on an international service trip, especially to a country like Cuba! But I also saw an incredible window of learning opportunities.

In my undergraduate religion classes at Pfeiffer University, I include the course objectives of encouraging critical thinking and civic engagement. When attempting to teach these skills, it is crucial to encourage students to examine their assumptions. Yet this is easier said than done. This is particularly the case at my institution, where 50 percent of the undergraduates are first-generation college students, and 80 percent of the students come from within a fifty-mile radius of North Carolina’s central Piedmont region. My theory is that many prospective students choose a college close to home precisely not to challenge their assumptions. This context makes recruiting students for international service trips all the more challenging, but at the same time, all the more rewarding. The background of my students places my course objectives directly at odds with my students’ goals (and perhaps their parents’ fears).

While it is possible to teach critical thinking and civic engagement in the classroom through reading and videos — I also like case studies — I find that there is nothing like traveling outside one’s own country to experience another culture. The objective of this particular international service trip was for the students to challenge their assumptions and prejudices through personal interaction with Cubans in the context of a service project. The first-hand knowledge of the Cuban situation, enhanced by personal encounters with Cubans, facilitates cognitive dissonance in which original assumptions are challenged with the acquisition of new information. 

Students did not earn academic credit for participating in this international service-learning program, but they did earn fifteen cultural credits, which is Pfeiffer University’s system for encouraging extracurricular activities. The process leading up to the actual trip lasted a full year. First, we recruited students through information sessions and presentations by students who had traveled on previous service-learning programs. Then we began orientation sessions in the fall with guest speakers, videos, and readings. Finally, in the spring semester immediately prior to our departure, the intensity turned up a notch with background reading on the history, culture, and politics of Cuba. We also collected medical supplies to donate to the medical commission of the Methodist Church in Cuba, which was our host and community partner. I required the students to keep a journal to reflect on their reading: they were required to continue this exercise during the trip. While actually in Cuba, in spite of a full in-country schedule of service in the form of building an apartment building for retired pastors in the central province of Las Villas, as well as encounters with Cubans and visits to historical and cultural sights, we also held nightly reflection sessions. I constantly came back to the question: is what you are seeing and hearing different from your expectations? Typical answers included “I thought there would be a lot more poverty” or “I thought that the houses would have dirt floors and that there wouldn’t be running water or electricity.” 

Naturally we did see hardships and shortages of basic commodities like medicine, which led to good discussions about the Cuban health care system, and eventually to the topic of the United States embargo. We hand-carried our donations of medicines into Cuba and were able to distribute them to medical personnel. One disturbing fact that students wrestled with is that the embargo includes medicine. Even at the height of the Iraq war, the United States never restricted medicines to Saddam Hussein. This and other troubling facts about United States foreign policy contributed to cognitive dissonance regarding what our government has told us about Cuba. The next step is to move from critical thinking to civic engagement. Upon returning, most students were committed to writing to their elected representatives and to seeking speaking engagements in churches and civic organizations. 

Having completed the international service-learning program, the primary difficulty that I have as an instructor is how to assess this follow-up civic action as part of the course. And then again, if it is required as part of the course (read coerced), then have I accomplished the learning objective of civic engagement or simply exerted power over students to fulfill an assignment? This leads to a larger service-learning question: how can we assess the learning outcome of civic engagement if it is required as part of a course?


My principal objectives in leading a service-learning to Cuba were to encourage critical thinking and civic engagement. The planning for the trip began a year before and intensified during the spring semester, culminating in a twelve-day service project in the central province of Las Villas, Cuba. The theoretical framework for the program began with the work of Paulo Freire, the late Brazilian pedagogue. Freire taught a liberatory pedagogy that encouraged students to be empowered to move from passive objects to active subjects of their own history. He challenged what he called the “banking concept” of education, in which students are treated as passive learners waiting for the instructors to “deposit” information in them. He attempted to revolutionize the educational process, and in turn, society, by replacing this teacher/student dichotomy with a liberatory pedagogy where both the teacher and the student gain critical consciousness with a greater awareness of reality through a dialectic relationship with one another.

Jack Mezirow developed a similar pedagogy that he called transformational learning. Like Freire, Mezirow begins with the student’s life experiences: through reflection on new experiences, students themselves produce a paradigm shift, leading to a more inclusive worldview and greater autonomy as persons. Finally, Richard Kiely has developed a pedagogy for global service-learning that encourages reflection on the service-learning experience. He encourages participants not only to expand horizons, but also to transform them. In addition to the pedagogical concern of student learning, global service-learning attempts to meet community needs without falling into colonizing patterns. In our program, for example, we travel with a letter of invitation from our community partner, who assigns us the location and the project.

When I began this service-learning program to take students from rural North Carolina to Cuba — most traveling outside the United States for the first time — I started a year-long orientation about Cuban history, culture, and politics. Through Freire and Mezirow’s pedagogies, I was also able to use this service-learning project in Cuba to allow students to learn more about their own reality. For example, in one assignment designed to prepare for our time in Cuba, I told the students that Cubans would ask them about their reality. I asked them, “What was the form of government, economy, culture, and history of North Carolina?” Initially they could not answer the question in a meaningful way, so it became a research project to prepare them for dialogue in Cuba. Through learning about their own context, they learned how much the economy had changed since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. This is something they knew on a personal level, since a major textile facility, Pillowtext, closed in nearby Kannapolis, laying off 5,000 workers in 2003 — including a parent of one of the students. My students (average age twenty) have lived the effects of NAFTA upon the North Carolina economy, exacerbating the decline of textiles, tobacco, and furniture production and forcing a transition to the financial industry, wineries, Google, Dell, and food research. Marking a transition in the economy, David Murdock, CEO of Dole Foods, has recently opened a $1.5 billion North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis. Students have felt these changes in the local economy, but they were not aware of how much North Carolina had changed during their lifetime until they did research to prepare for their international service.

Similarly, the actual service project in Cuba challenged their understanding of reality when they realized, for example, that Jesse Helms, a Republican senator from North Carolina, was the author of the Helms-Burton law that tightened the United States embargo of Cuba and made it illegal for foreign companies trading with Cuba to trade with the United States. This law had the effect of extending the United States embargo to other countries and making it a de facto blockade. When the students saw the effects of this policy, and the personal involvement of Helms, they were appalled at the humanitarian effect on the personal lives of Cubans and many were motivated to write to their elected representatives upon returning to the United States. In this case, students exhibited transformational learning; they drew upon new personal experiences to develop a more inclusive worldview, and hopefully, greater autonomy as persons.


After returning from our twelve-day international service-learning trip to Cuba, I had the opportunity to reflect on the fulfillment of the program’s objectives and learning outcomes. My principal objectives were to encourage critical thinking and civic engagement, inspired by the theoretical framework of Paulo Freire’s liberatory pedagogy of critical consciousness through dialogue with reality. As I reflected on the whole process of recruiting, orienting, and traveling with a group of students from rural North Carolina to Cuba, I first felt a feeling of accomplishment and then a feeling of exhaustion; I went home and slept for two days. It was not my first such international service trip by any means — one student had in fact been outside the United States on a trip with me to Nicaragua the year before — but each trip represents a significant personal investment.

When I reflect back on how little international travel experience these students typically have, I tend to think that I am crazy to assume such a huge responsibility — not to mention liability! So when we returned safely to the United States, I had a feeling of accomplishment, and even relief, because I was able to recruit and retain the students in the program against the inevitable concerns of parents for their children’s safety. Yet in retrospect, I also saw so much personal growth in the students. Wow! I felt this is the primary motivating factor that kept me going. I had seen these students grow from naïve eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who didn’t know how to apply for a passport to world citizens writing to their senators and studying Spanish in order to e-mail their new friends in Cuba! I know they will never watch the news the same way, especially when they hear that we need a blockade against Cuba because it is a threat to our national security. At graduation the same year, I ran into a former student who had participated in a one-month service-learning program to Mexico a few years ago. When I asked her about her Spanish, she immediately switched over to Spanish and told me about her work as a bilingual school counselor. The transformation of such students into engaged citizens validates the course objectives of international service trips. 

Including this most recent program to Cuba, I have now led thirteen national and international service trips in seven years at my current institution. After each trip I say that I won’t do it again, yet here I am thinking about where to go next year. Before coming to Pfeiffer University, I worked for fifteen years in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico, so I guess you could say that I have it in my blood. 

     
 

Over the years I have learned three tips for those interested in leading an international service-learning program:

1. Cultivate support in your institution for your program. Find out who else is interested in what you are doing, who has done something similar, and create a support network. Then, if something goes wrong, you will have some supporters. Conversely, if you do something right, then you will have some cheerleaders and will create an institutional memory of successful programs.

2. Create incentives to recruit students. At Pfeiffer University, we have “cultural credits” that all students need to graduate. My international trips offer fifteen cultural credits, which students covet. In addition, for the last two trips I’ve led, I have recruited a student assistant. The students can use this as an internship for their major, and in the absence of other institutional support, can be a tremendous help in planning the trip. I’ve asked my assistant to handle airline and hotel reservations, to keep the books, and to send reminders for meetings to other students. They consider this a privilege that looks good on their resume. Also, remember that students are often the best recruiters of other students! So choose a popular, self-motivated student with whom you enjoy working.

3. Ask students to give presentations, to write to their senators, and/or to write letters to the editor when they return. You can make this a requirement in the syllabus to fulfill learning objectives directly related to civic engagement. Students who travel to “exotic” countries can be big news for many small-town newspapers. Even in larger cities, news outlets such as newspapers, radio, and television appreciate personal interest stories when a local resident participates in an international service trip. This assignment has the two-fold effect of breaking down stereotypes about the country visited, as well as being a healthy outlet for the student to overcome the effects of “reverse cultural shock,” which is the phenomenon of expecting that everything will be the same once one gets “home” from a service experience in another culture. Travelers often go through a mild depression upon returning because, while friends and family have basically remained the same, the traveler has been significantly affected by the experience. I encourage students to talk about their experiences through presentations in classes, clubs, and/or chapel. The increased visibility on campus multiplies the impact of the program and recruits students for the next year. Through such sharing, students will be creating greater international awareness, building institutional support for the program, and directly practicing civic engagement!

 
     

To learn more about Pfeiffer University's international service-learning programs, visit their website.