Background on Transborder Service Learning

Service learning across the disciplines has been aimed, especially in recent years, at promoting greater civic engagement by students (Saltmarsh 2005; Furco 2007). The practice has been viewed as particularly appropriate for political science courses because of its emphasis on encouraging more active and engaged forms of citizenship (Barber and Battistoni 1993; Markus, Howard, and King 1997; Ehrlich 1999; Hunter and Brisbin 2000). Students who have taken part in service-learning courses typically do demonstrate enhanced understanding of citizenship-related issues (Perry and Katula 2001). Additionally, they report an increased sense of duty and intention toward becoming more civically engaged in their lives outside the academy, though results are mixed on how far the latter intention translates into extensive involvement later in life (Campbell 2000; Hepburn, Niemi, and Chapman 2000; Kirlin 2002).

The study reported here was designed to explore whether students taking part in a transborder service-learning project would report similar gains in understanding and awareness of transborder issues, gains in a sense of obligation to address such issues, and gains in a sense of efficacy in being able to address them. Transborder service learning is understood here as an approach that involves place-bound students serving a population located across an international boundary. It can be distinguished from standard service-learning courses or programs, in which students serve in civic engagement projects or deliver specific kinds of aid to local organizations or populations (see Magid 2000). It also can be distinguished from two other approaches to service learning that have international or cross-cultural components. The first of these is most commonly called international service learning. It has become an increasingly significant approach in study abroad programs for undergraduate students. In international service learning, students travel to another country for a prescribed period of time in a discrete class or cohort, are hosted by an institution or agency, and serve in the host region for residents of that region (Silcox and Leek 1997; Grusky 2000; Tonkin and Quiroga 2004). Students are engaged in overseas service from as little as a few days or weeks to a full semester or longer (Lewis 2005; Smith-Paríolá 2006). Programs aim to promote a sense of cross-border obligation and commitment to global social justice through direct interaction with overseas communities in the service relationship (Monard-Weissman 2003; Kiely 2004). Some academic institutions, in particular the University of Louisville and the University of Denver, have formalized international service learning, creating stand-alone programs that connect students to service opportunities in Belize, El Salvador, India, Thailand, and other developing states (University of Denver 2008; University of Louisville 2008). In addition, more than 2,000 students from scores of colleges and universities have engaged in international service learning since the mid-1980s through the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership (see Tonkin and Quiroga 2004; IPSL 2008).

The second international approach also involves experiences with persons from other countries or cultures. We will refer to this approach as place-bound interaction. In this approach to service learning, students' sense of civic engagement, as well as their understanding of international issues, is enhanced through rendering service to persons newly arrived to their own country. For example, Patterson (2000) discusses an upper-division international relations course in which students interacted with and provided aid to a Bosnian refugee family. They used a small pool of funds provided by their college to shop for goods to donate to the family. They also helped the family move into temporary housing and engaged in various forms of interaction through informal visits to the family's home several times during the semester. In the same vein, Koulish (1998) details a Citizenship Service Learning program at Bentley College in Massachusetts, in which students are encouraged to think more critically about their own roles and capacities as national citizens by assisting immigrants in the Boston area who are working through the process of applying for U.S. citizenship.

This article focuses on a specific effort in transborder service learning where students were place bound, but their service was oriented to a population located across an international border. Our working hypothesis was that, as in place-bound interaction, students' service experience would be enriched by their gaining specific knowledge about another culture and its political and economic context. In addition, because they were directly serving a population located across a national boundary, one that did not share their citizenship and was not working toward acquiring U.S. citizen status, we expected that some of the same results would be observed as in international service learning. Specifically, we expected the transborder service to promote the acceptance of a more transnational or cosmopolitan conception of obligation, where duties to aid and become engaged in issues of social justice are not so clearly delineated by national belonging or geographic locale (see Dower and Williams 2002; Hayden 2005).

The Service Project

Students participating in the transborder service-learning project were enrolled in an upper-division elective course in political science, Transnational Justice. In general, they had taken a number of lower- and upper-division courses in political science and related disciplines, and they had some familiarity with issues of global inequality and poverty in developing countries. Since the course was a special-topics elective and did not fulfill any specific degree, college, or university-wide requirements, students self selected into it. They were given the opportunity to choose between the service track and a non-service course track. Those choosing the service track were required to complete 20 hours of service and engage in reflective writing. They kept a journal, a minimum of 12 pages, documenting the specific service work they did and discussing how that work did or did not tie in to the political theory texts they were reading in the class on issues of transnational justice. Such reflective writing can promote deeper engagement with class material and discussions in general (Josefson 2005), and it can be particularly productive in encouraging service-learning students to critically pursue issues raised in their service to specific projects or populations (Eyler 2002). Of the 33 students enrolled, 26 chose the service-learning track and seven the non-service track. We say more below on the relatively small number of non-service students.

The service work was closely related to material presented in Cabrera's (the first author) Transnational Justice class. Cabrera encouraged students to weigh arguments for cosmopolitan approaches to foreign aid, immigration, and related issues (Carens 1992; Nussbaum 2002; Cabrera 2004) against arguments for more state-centric approaches, in which strong priority is presumed for co-citizens (R. Miller 1998; D. Miller 2004). Cabrera consistently emphasized potential links between the theoretical arguments and service work in lectures, class discussions, and prepared materials. The service-learning students had the option of contributing to the cross-border food drive we had organized and helped operate for the previous three spring terms at ASU West. Or, they could choose to contribute to some other internationally oriented service project. A few service-track students initially expressed interest in serving with international nongovernmental agencies (INGOs) with offices in the Phoenix area, but ultimately all chose to take part in the six-week food drive.

Since 2002, the food drive has delivered the equivalent of more than 100,000 cans of food to the Casa de la Misericordia (House of Mercy) community center in Nogales, Sonora. Since spring 2005, about one-third of the food also has gone to a Phoenix-area food bank to support a meals program for area children (see Anastasi and Cabrera 2005). The donations taken to Mexico support a hot-lunch program initiated by Nogales residents some 25 years ago. In the late 1990s, those residents partnered with Tucson, Arizona-based BorderLinks, a 501c3 nonprofit organization focusing on experiential education in the Mexican border region, and the lunch program now serves more than 300 children each weekday during the school-year. Center staff also provide low-cost child care and other services.

BorderLinks's executive board and staff are binational, and they make decisions on the lunch and other programs jointly. That, and the fact that the lunch program is operated by some of the same Nogales residents who first fed the children from their own limited personal funds years ago, make the service project particularly suited to promoting cross-border education and understanding. Such dynamics also help to mitigate concerns about paternalism and cultural sensitivity that can arise in service projects with an international component (Grusky 2000, 859). Much critical discussion remains, of course, concerning possible portrayals of the children served or their parents as victims, among other issues (see Hondagneu-Sotelo and Raskoff 1994). However, the program's local, grassroots character helps to lessen perceptions of dependency or personal inefficacy on the part of those receiving material aid.

Actual service work included the weekly sorting, counting, and storing of donated food on campus. Since we constructed the food drive as a competition between the campus units and student organizations at ASU West, each donated item had to be assigned a certain count, i.e., a certain number of points for a 10-pound sack of rice, beans, and so on. The count for each participating unit was recorded and reported to organizers. Service-track students also independently solicited donations at their churches, their workplaces, outside grocery stores, and by simply knocking on doors in various neighborhoods. One service-track student assumed the role of food drive coordinator, tracking the number of hours individual students worked and matching volunteers to tasks. Finally, a four-student “educational outreach team” conducted independent research on Nogales, Sonora, and the House of Mercy and prepared promotion materials, including a food drive brochure, informational poster, and a Microsoft Power Point presentation. They and several other service-track students showed the presentation in more than a dozen classes campus wide.

After spending their six service weeks—and in many cases volunteering considerably more than their required 20 hours—collecting and counting the food, service learners gathered to load it onto a rented truck. We then drove the truck two hours south to Tucson, where it was unloaded at the BorderLinks U.S. headquarters. BorderLinks staff delivered the food over a few weeks to the Nogales facility. Finally, shortly after the end of the drive, we invited all students in the course on the experiential learning trip to the southern Arizona desert. There they collected and recorded items discarded by unauthorized migrants in their journeys on foot from the border to vehicle pickup sites, or in many cases to Tucson, some 75 miles from the border crossing. Six Transnational Justice students took part, all of them on the service track, and they shared their experience with other students in class discussion, as well as by showing and explaining photos from the trip.

The Study

In order to evaluate the impact of the service-learning component, we administered a 56-item student survey at the beginning of the 16-week course, and again at the conclusion. Responses varied from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Following the initial survey, students selected either the service-learning or the standard course track. The survey questions administered at the end of the semester were identical to those at the beginning except for changes in word tense. Survey questions were unique or were adopted and modified from existing instruments (Piper, DeYoung, and Lamsam 2000; California State University System 2002). Each of the questions included on the post-survey is in the appendix.

Significance of Findings

The findings from this transborder service-learning project are consistent with findings from previous studies on ways in which international service learning can increase students' sense of engagement with issues and individuals across borders. For example, in a longitudinal study of students taking part in an international service-learning project with a social justice orientation, Kiely (2004) found significant transformation in perspectives, though students also reported difficulties or tensions in moving from heightened awareness of cross-border social issues to taking significant positive action to address such issues in their specific overseas service locales. Tonkin and Quiroga (2004) conducted a focus group study of 17 students taking part in international service-learning programs through the previously-noted International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership (IPSL) and observed that their student participants reported a greater sense of connectedness to global issues. Monard-Weissman (2003) reported similarly heightened awareness of global social issues and an increased sense of cross-border responsibility among IPSL students who participated in a service-learning program in Guayquil, Ecuador. Similar, though not systematic, observations are reported by Patterson (2000) in the place-bound interaction project involving aid to a Bosnian refugee family.

In sum, the findings for the current study indicate that place-bound students in a transborder service-learning class can realize many of the gains in understanding and engagement that are reported by students in international service learning, as well as by students in a place-bound interaction context. In addition, transborder service-learning students are able to make direct contributions of service and material aid similar to those participating in international service learning. In terms of enhanced understanding, the transborder students reported that they simply could not explain the need for the food drive without specific information on the economic context in Nogales, Mexico. Students reported being quizzed as they solicited donations in neighborhoods, outside grocery stores, and in campus classes, clubs, and other contexts, about why the bulk of the food collected was going to Mexico, especially as there was significant need much closer to home. Students were able to respond with information about low wages in the foreign-owned maquiladora factories where many of the recipient children's parents worked. They also offered information on a widespread lack of water, electricity, and other basic services in many Nogales neighborhoods, including some where the served children lived. In the process, their sense of connection with the recipient population was enhanced, and judging from survey results, so was their sense of obligation to such cross-border dwellers in need. The findings also reinforce an emerging literature on incorporating service-learning units into international relations, political theory, human rights (Krain and Nurse 2004), and more general philosophy courses (Lisman and Harvey 2000).

Limitations and Future Directions

The transborder service-learning model has potentially very wide application in higher education—in political science as well as a range of other disciplines. Classes at institutions located relatively near the border easily could replicate the food drive model, or another focusing on international transfers of material-aid, given the level of existing need and the relatively well developed networks of NGOs around the several large population centers on both sides of the border. Those situated elsewhere also could take advantage of NGO networks to deliver a range of tangible goods to overseas populations, including cash transfers directed to specific projects. For example, at ASU West campus, students in a political science course taught by Professor Julie Murphy Erfani were deeply impressed by the poverty they had witnessed on a BorderLinks experiential learning trip to some Nogales neighborhoods. They decided to launch a fundraising drive to support a financial initiative by BorderLinks' Nogales-based staffers. Students solicited donations over several months totaling more than $9,000, which provided base funding for a successful and still-expanding micro-credit program that BorderLinks launched in Nogales (Cutrer 2005).

Similar efforts could be undertaken with any of an increasingly large number of INGOs focusing on transborder issues, and they need not be limited to the collection and delivery of material aid. Thousands of U.S.-based organizations conduct informational or action-directed campaigns with international emphases. An excellent resource for locating such organizations, or for directing students interested in contributing service with a transborder focus, is the Idealist.org web site, which maintains a searchable database of tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations worldwide. Searches can be narrowed to organizations operating in particular cities, states, or provinces within the United States, Canada, and other countries.

The clearest limitation of this transborder service-learning study was the small number of non-service track students. This could be addressed through increasing the number of participants, possibly by increasing the enrollment size of the courses involved, permitting only a certain number of students to choose the service track, or having different sections of the same course select different tracks. Also, more contact with those who have direct knowledge of the populations being served could be incorporated into the classes or the service project. A guest speaker from the BorderLinks staff, for example, could provide important insider's insight to students, in addition to giving some indication of the actual uses aid can and is being put to.

In conclusion, transborder service learning provides a promising means of enhancing the engagement of place-bound students with the many communities they are embedded in, from the most local to the global. No claim is made here that a transborder service experience is fully substitutable for an international immersion, where students are not only serving a specific population, but living and engaging with that population in myriad ways for an extended period of time. As the results of this study suggest, however, place-bound students participating in service to a cross-border population can gain tremendously in their understanding of the special issues and problems faced by those in less-affluent countries. They can develop an enhanced sense of engagement and obligation to contribute, not only to those being served across borders, but to those in their local communities. The experience comes at a small fraction of the cost of an international service experience, and it is available to students whose family, work, or other circumstances keep them closer to home.