Although service learning was established as a method for combining relevant student learning opportunities with community engagement, recent critiques highlight the shift from achieving community-defined goals towards a predominate focus on assessing student learning. Focusing on a community's decision-making process regarding a homeless shelter, this article describes a cross-curricular project that combines critical service learning with participatory action research. Using community and participant defined goals and interactions to steer the research process enabled achievement of both student learning and attempts at community transformation.

Creating Space for Marginalized Voices: Re-focusing Service Learning on Community Change and Social Justice

This text explores American culture from the mid-19th century to 1920 through the lens of one episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language amongst deaf people. The debate about sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages", humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, the author found that, although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language.

Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language

This paper presents the development of a new course on disability issues entitled “Disability Rights and Social Work Practice” that was offered in the spring semester of 1999 in the Bachelors of Social Work program. This disability advocacy course consists of three components: distance education utilizing websites and a computer interactive program, community service learning, and seminars on campus.

Reiko Hayashi

Papers

A Course on Disability Advocacy