Service-learning advocate: Learn from the communities you serve

A healthy service-learning program should learn from the communities it aims to serve, not dominate them, said Nadinne Cruz, an expert and consultant on the subject who spoke Tuesday at Duke University.

"Academy is not the center of all relevant knowledge for what the world needs," she told an audience of about 50 people at the Freeman Center for Jewish Life. "The problem is the academy is the dominant voice. When (academic knowledge) dominates the community, (other) knowledge is left out, marginalized, silenced."

Cruz did not address Duke's service-learning efforts directly, but spoke of her more than 25 years as a practitioner, advocate and speaker on the need for including civic engagement as part of higher education learning.

Cruz, a former director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University, shared examples of communities that had amazing knowledge that benefitted their residents but did not come from academia. These included "uneducated" farmers in her native Philippines who developed sustainable farming practices; high school students in predominantly low-income East Palo Alto, Calif., who taught themselves about zoning regulations then used that knowledge to shut down a proposed toxic waste dump; and farmers in France who housed Jews during the Holocaust.

Cruz showed a slide of a circle representing all the knowledge of the universe and noted that academia only represented a sliver of that pie.

"I am not advocating throwing out institutions but that they become part of that community," she said. "We need to see our institutions as having a place in the circle, not the circle."

She added that one of the problems with higher education engagement programs is that they tend to be overly focused on methods and disconnected from context.

She left her audience with this question: "What is it that I should do, what is it that I can do, to create a better world?"