ABSTRACT
Community service seems easily integrated into courses whose subject matter operates in the “real world” close at hand. However, it is somewhat counterintuitive to try to integrate service into a course that focuses on a world a hemisphere away. Nevertheless, in the fall semester of 1995, the author undertook to incorporate service-learning into a course in Latin American government and politics. During the first week of the course, students heard presentations by representatives of the three service sites chosen for the course. Students had some choice of both their site location and type of service. The Latin American politics course is an upper-division course, with sophisticated students quite capable of complex analysis. But the general level of knowledge about the region and its politics is low, resulting in a course in which the instructor must often combine an introductory-level posture with an upper-division course’s complexity of analysis.
