Abstract

This dissertation reconceptualizes the theories and practices of service-learning. This project is critically important for the following two reasons: service-learning itself is so under theorized that its current theories actually limit educators' conceptualizations of service-learning practices, and some of the practices most narrowly conceptualized are those that relate to the creation of educational communities. Because I believe that all academic endeavors have both a theoretical and communal component, I look at the on-going creation of communities and the on-going production of the theories that describe them as two of education's most indispensable goals. Towards these goals, this dissertation offers service-learning as a mechanism for creating the types of communities that are likely to thrive amidst the contemporary academy's conflicts, tensions, diversities, and complexities. ;To initiate the reconceptualization of service-learning, the first part of this dissertation identifies, reviews, and problematizes the two conceptualizations that most I commonly circulate in the literature. The first conceptualization posits service-learning as a program, pedagogy, philosophy, or combination thereof, and the second represents service-learning in terms of its programmatic definitions, continuums, or paradigms. Cognizant of the limitations associated with these conceptual camps, I suggest, in part two of this dissertation, that service-learning is best conceptualized as a type of community. Toward that end, I use feminist theory in general and postmodern feminist theory in particular to explicate, in part three of this dissertation, the type of community about which I service is and ought to be