Education Commons^™

Service-Learning Is... How Faculty Explain Their Practice, Kerryann O'Meara, Elizabeth Niehaus

KerryAnn O'Meara

Many researchers have explored faculty engagement in service-learning. However, scholarship rarely considers ways in which the discourses used by faculty to describe service-learning — the stories they tell about what it is they are doing and why — construct images of subject positions, problems, and solutions that inform our beliefs about service-learning and our practice. The purpose of this study was to understand the dominant discourses used by faculty to explain service-learning. The nomination files of 109 exemplary faculty nominated for the Thomas Ehrlich Award were analyzed. Findings indicate that faculty use four dominant discourses regarding the purposes and significance …