1. Borderlands Theory in Service-Learning
Research: Remapping the Metaphor
Rachael Wendler, University of Arizona
rwendler@u.arizona.edu
IARSLCE 2012

2. The Story Seed

3. Taylor, J. (2002). Metaphors we serve by: Investigating
the conceptual metaphors framing national and
community service and service-learning.
• Conceptual metaphors “structure what we perceive,
how we get around in the world, and how we relate
to other people” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
• Service is Citizenship; Service is War; Service is
Business
• Taylor’s suggestion: Service is Borderlands

4. Service-Learning as Borderlands?
Butin, 2005; Chesler, Ford, Galura, & Chareneau,
2011; Delgado Bernal, Aleman & Garavito, 2001;
Hayes & Cuban, 1997; Keith, 1998; Taylor, 2002;
Williams & Van Cleave, 2011.

5. Mapping Metaphors
SERVICE-LEARNING IS WAR
Source: War Target: Service-
Learning
Soldiers  Students
General  Teacher
Community Members as Enemy? Fellow
Soldiers? Innocent Civilians? Captains?

6. Mapping Metaphors
SERVICE-LEARNING IS BORDER CROSSING
Source: Borderlands Target: Service-Learning
Theory
Border Crossers  All Students?

7. • Psychological, Spiritual,
Sexual Borderlands
• Chicana identity and
oppression
• Challenges of mediating
between home and
dominant cultures
• Resisting binaries
• Genre-blurring

8. “The prohibited and forbidden are its [the Borderlands’] inhabitants. Los
atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the
troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in
short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the
‘normal’” (pp. 25-26).

9. Giroux and McLaren’s Border Pedagogy
“First, the category of border signals a recognition of
those epistemological, political, cultural, and social
margins that structure the language of history, power,
and difference . . . Second, it also speaks to the need to
create pedagogical conditions in which students become
border crossers in order to understand otherness in its
own terms . . . Third, border pedagogy makes visible the
historically and socially constructed strengths and
limitations of those places and borders we inherit and
that frame our discourses and social relations.”
(Giroux,1992, p. 28)

10. C. Alejandra Elenas: Stretching
the Borderlands frame to apply to
all students “raises the
problematic of appropriation and
erasure of difference” (1997,
para. 30).

11. Erasure of Difference?
• “…university tutors left campus and entered places in the
community and community agencies that they ordinarily
would never go” (Hayes & Cuban, 1997, p. 75)
• “Crossing these physical borders…exposed tutors to the
effects of poverty and racism on individual lives” (Hayes &
Cuban, 1997, p. 75)
• “Challenging students’ prior homogenous experiences, the
agencies and sites in which community service learning
students work and learn typically serve populations marked
by racial and economic disadvantage” (Chesler et al., 2011,
p. 342)

12. Border Students: a fluid category incorporating students who,
for reasons such as ethnicity, class, or language, feel the service
site is just as much—or more— home than the university.
Hybrid Identities

13. Belonging at the Service Site
• Sites are Comfortable: “home away from home” (Lee, 2005,
p. 6); “more comfortable at their service sites than on
campus” (Green, 2001, p. 25).
• Identification with Clients: “I was once one of them”
(Delgado Bernal, Aleman, & Garavito, 2001, p. 575); “I have
something in common … with them because *we’re+
minorities, most of [us] are from low-income families, and
most of them *would be+ first generation in college” (Lee,
2005, p. 6).
• Stronger Service (McCollum, 2003; Green, 2001): “There is
a sense of validity in what I have to say. I am not pretending
to understand, I do understand” (Shadduck-Hernandez,
2006, p. 30).

14. Not Belonging at Service Site
• Intersectionality: “I knew my advice only ran so deep because of
the differences between our lives” (Lee, 2005, p. 6)
• Internalized Racism: “a black woman . . .opened the door . . . I
knew she was wondering who I was. If her mind could tell this story,
she was probably thinking, ‘Who is this young black girl . . .That’s all
it takes, that split second for one member of the black race to doubt
the other. I knew this is what she was thinking by her facial
expression and how it changed when Elsa’s white face came into
view of the doorway, and all of a sudden this 40-year-old woman
seemed welcoming.” (Green, 2001, p. 23)

15. University Affiliation: “One of the classes said, oh, did
your parents buy you a BMW for Christmas and are you
from New Jersey? I was like, no what, no. . . . I wanted to
be, I am just like you I am not your typical Bucknell student
. . . . It kind of made me feel like. . . I don't fit in
anywhere. Like you see Bucknell students as this, and I am
not that.” (Henry, 2005, p. 57)

16. Not Belonging at the University
• Culture Shock: (Yeh, 2010)
• Service as “White”: (Gilbride-Brown, 2011; Coles, 1999)
• Curriculum to help privileged students understand
privilege: “This isn’t written for me” (Wendler, 2010).
• Exhaustion at Educating Dominant Students: “I do more
service in this class than I ever do at my site” (Mitchell &
Donahue, 2009); “Sometimes I get real tired of
hearing White people talk about the conditions of Black
people” (Tatum, 1992, p. 7); (Chesler et al., 2011).
• Anger: Personal experiences placed in larger context of
inequality (Tatum, 1992).

17. Belonging at the University
ce-Learning Class as “Safe Space”: (Delgado-Bernal, Aleman, &
vito, 2001; Gilbride-Brown, 2011; Shadduck-Hernandez, 2006).

18. Recommendations for Teaching
• Acknowledge hybrid identities
• Encourage “divergent thinking”
• Create spaces for border
students to reflect together
• Be aware of emotional
demands involved in border
identity development
• Allow choice in service site
selection
• Include readings about organic
intellectuals

19. Recommendations for Research
• Consider remapping the metaphor
• Acknowledge hybrid identities
• Deepen research into border student experiences
• Utilize asset-based epistemologies (la facultad)

20. Creative Commons Image Credits: Jcarter, ZareK, Nathan Gibbs, Tricia Wang