From Privilege to Assets: The Use of Asset Based Community Development in Service Learning Reflection

Presentation Format

Individual Presentation

Intended Audience

All Audiences

Program Abstract

This presentation advocates for the use of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) as a primer for reflection in service learning. ABCD is used by organizations and communities to identify and catalogue resources available to further community development, but the method and its vocabulary can be repurposed and used to spur positive reflection on power and privilege

Presentation Description

This presentation advocates for the use of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) as a primer for reflection in service learning. ABCD is used by organizations and communities to identify and catalogue resources available to further community development, but the method and its vocabulary can be repurposed and used to spur positive reflection on power and privilege.

All too often students in service learning courses cast themselves as heroes in the narratives they tell themselves and share in class reflection session. These narratives elide consideration of the social and economic histories of all involved, their own privileged position, and social consequences of their “service”.

Insistences that instructors and facilitators of service learning urge students to consider in the role of power, privilege, and intersecting identities in service learning has been to the great benefit to the practice. This paper participates in that push for greater awareness of social identity in service learning by advocating for a particular mode of reflection that pushes students toward a vocabulary inherently resistant of harmful tropes.

College students in service learning experiences may find the ABCD model useful as a descriptive tool. Actively charting community assets and seeing them paired them with initiatives of their community partner organization allows students to see the ways which their work is mutually beneficial, a collaboration between partners.

Reflection activities built around ABCD give students access to language to describe their work that may be otherwise unavailable. In particular, alternatives to paternalistic, condescending and ultimately harmful linguistic framings built around terminology such was “helping” and “saving”. These terms imply deficiencies and perpetuate bias based on distinctions made around class, race, gender, and ability.

Such an approach to reflection can be productive for students well versed in critical race theory and those who are unfamiliar or even averse to the field. While “service” framed as such is seen as antithetical to capitalist market forces, an ideology of many students, the asset based approach encourages students to consider their organization and its partners in the community as collaborators in an endeavor with a shared benefit, to build the “assets” of all parties.

Student pushes to rethink previously misunderstood notions of need and “poverty”. Student can also begin to understand their identities are generally viewed as “assets” and to consider the extent to which this consideration is an unearned privilege.

Location

Room - 217

Start Date

4-15-2016 9:45 AM

End Date

4-15-2016 11:00 AM

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Apr 15th, 9:45 AM Apr 15th, 11:00 AM

From Privilege to Assets: The Use of Asset Based Community Development in Service Learning Reflection

Room - 217

This presentation advocates for the use of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) as a primer for reflection in service learning. ABCD is used by organizations and communities to identify and catalogue resources available to further community development, but the method and its vocabulary can be repurposed and used to spur positive reflection on power and privilege.

All too often students in service learning courses cast themselves as heroes in the narratives they tell themselves and share in class reflection session. These narratives elide consideration of the social and economic histories of all involved, their own privileged position, and social consequences of their “service”.

Insistences that instructors and facilitators of service learning urge students to consider in the role of power, privilege, and intersecting identities in service learning has been to the great benefit to the practice. This paper participates in that push for greater awareness of social identity in service learning by advocating for a particular mode of reflection that pushes students toward a vocabulary inherently resistant of harmful tropes.

College students in service learning experiences may find the ABCD model useful as a descriptive tool. Actively charting community assets and seeing them paired them with initiatives of their community partner organization allows students to see the ways which their work is mutually beneficial, a collaboration between partners.

Reflection activities built around ABCD give students access to language to describe their work that may be otherwise unavailable. In particular, alternatives to paternalistic, condescending and ultimately harmful linguistic framings built around terminology such was “helping” and “saving”. These terms imply deficiencies and perpetuate bias based on distinctions made around class, race, gender, and ability.

Such an approach to reflection can be productive for students well versed in critical race theory and those who are unfamiliar or even averse to the field. While “service” framed as such is seen as antithetical to capitalist market forces, an ideology of many students, the asset based approach encourages students to consider their organization and its partners in the community as collaborators in an endeavor with a shared benefit, to build the “assets” of all parties.

Student pushes to rethink previously misunderstood notions of need and “poverty”. Student can also begin to understand their identities are generally viewed as “assets” and to consider the extent to which this consideration is an unearned privilege.