ABSTRACT
A colleague of ours at Portland State University begins each of her service-learning courses by asking her students to consider the following: What they are about to engage in as learners-through-serving will ultimately compose only about a third of the totality of their experience. The first third, she says, they’ve already lived through, in the days and weeks and months and years leading up to this particular moment in their personal and academic lives. The middle third is the collaboration they are embarking on right now. The final third lives in the future, when this group of individuals takes the learning they have gained in the past and in this current moment and applies it to future actions. Remembering that we have had a whole host of experiences that has shaped the persons we are, that we currently are living a new set of experiences that inform our being, and that we make decisions, whether intentionally or not, about who we are becoming, reminds us of the power we have as individuals to choose how to live our lives within communities of others. (Complete exercise 14.1.)
