Co-Constructing Defensive Discourses of Service-Learning in Psychology: A Psychosocial Understanding of Anxiety and Service-Learning, and the Implications for Social Justice

• Published in: Teaching of psychology Vol. 50; no. 2; pp. 164 - 174
• Main Authors: Haselau, Tracey, Saville Young, Lisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01-04-2023; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Anxiety; College Students; Courses; Discourse Analysis; Educational psychology; Foreign Countries; Learning activities; Power Structure; Prejudice; Psychoanalysis; Psychological Patterns; Psychology; Psychology of learning; Resistance (Psychology); Service Learning; Social Environment; Social Justice; Student Motivation; Teaching Methods; South Africa; prejudice; psychosocial studies; social justice; service-learning; anxiety in learning
• ISSN: 0098-6283; 1532-8023
• DOI: 10.1177/00986283221077206

Background
This paper describes findings from research conducted on students who participated in a service-learning course in South Africa.
Objective
The study aimed to understand how participants constructed their experiences of service-learning and to interrogate their emotional investments in these constructions.
Method
Data were collected and analyzed using a psychosocial methodology, consisting of discursive and psychoanalytic readings of interview transcripts, reflective journal entries, and researcher field notes.
Results
The discursive findings focus on how participants employed liberal traditional learning discourses to construct service-learning as linear resulting in subject positions that reinforced prejudices and the power structures supporting these. A psychoanalytic reading of the data suggests that participants invested in these constructions to defend against their own anxiety related to uncertainty and guilt about privilege in an unfamiliar context.
Conclusion
Students invest in liberal traditional discourses of service-learning for defensive reasons, which can be understood as arising from the intersubjective and social context in which the service-learning takes place.
Teaching Implications
Recognizing prejudice as emanating from anxiety generated by the affective work required for service-learning means thinking creatively about how to both contain and allow this affective work to take place in service-learning activities.