“Like a Slap in the Face, But a Good One”: A Service-Learning Project and a College Student’s Reflection, Agency, and Vulnerability in an After-school Fifth-Grade Writing Club

Reflection, Agency, and Vulnerability

Abstract

Racism still drives the college curriculum at the cost of Black and Brown students. Service-learning courses are one way to address college students’ deficit thinking by offering interactions in real world situations with people from minoritized backgrounds. This study focuses on a pivotal discursive interaction between a university instructor and an undergraduate situated as a writing mentor in a service-learning course centered around an after-school writing club with Black and Brown fifth graders. Course instructors sought to humanize pedagogical practices by establishing an asset-based writing club with “Roseanna” a white, undergraduate mentor and fifth graders. Within this experiential learning space, university students and instructors regularly reflected on their interactions with fifth graders to explore how unconscious assumptions can impede one’s ability to value and affirm children's writing identities. Instructors’ discourse encouraged Roseanna and her peers to consider the (de)humanizing effects associated with one’s discourse, implicit bias, and social/positional identities. The research question guiding this paper is, “How did an undergraduate writing mentor in a service-learning literacy course negotiate the positions made available by instructors in an asset-based after-school writing club?”  We ground our investigation in positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990; McVee et al., 2018) and draw on the model of mutual vulnerability (McKenna & Brantmeier, 2020) to analyze Roseanna’s discourse in relation to her social identity categories and privilege. More specifically, we examined the ways her verbal and written discourse revealed her positioning of self and other in relation to agency, culture, race, and beyond. Our findings capture how a dialogic exchange, during a routine writing club debriefing, was pivotal to Roseanna’s ability to reflect and act from a more humanizing and asset-based position with children in the writing club. Roseanna had moments of being reflective, agentive, and vulnerable. A pivotal teaching moment with on-going critical curriculum can support the quest toward equity and justice in schools.