Decoding ourselves : an inquiry into faculty learning about reciprocity in service-learning

Faculty learning in Global Service-Learning is an important area of research because understanding how faculty develop their practice is an important first step in improving student learning outcomes and relationships with community members. Enacting reciprocity in service-learning can be particularly troublesome because it requires faculty to learn to develop courses and partnerships in counternormative ways. This article reports on an approach to investigating and generating faculty learning, in our case about the threshold concept of reciprocity, through a group self-study process that included a new-to-the-field interview method developed for Decoding the Disciplines (Pace & Middendorf, 2004) followed by individual and then group reflection. Our self-study resulted in new perspectives and new awareness related to the value of examining the concept of reciprocity and the role of group dialogue in generating learning – although the specific nature of these changes was somewhat different for all of us, and analysis shows that that the Decoding interview and the multidisciplinary nature of our group were both important factors in developing the trust necessary for this study to generate learning. We suggest that further collaborative inquiry within and across different service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) contexts could yield new insights about the value of integrating methods from self-study and autoethnography for professional development and research on faculty learning, the conditions needed to foster trust and the role trust plays in transformative learning processes, and the significance of the choice to frame learning spaces as “safe” or not, thus advancing our collective understanding of the dynamics of co-learning and co-generation of knowledge within but also transcending SLCE.