Think Globally, Teach Locally: Experiencing the Foreign Aid Debate Through Service Learning

Novel curricular strategies are required if institutions want all students to actively experience the benefits of global knowledge and civic engagement, as financial and practical commitments frequently make study abroad inaccessible to many students. In this paper, we outline an innovative service-learning course, where local action coupled with an international target, offered a parallel and novel learning strategy that capitalized on the strengths of experiential education, while providing a practical and more inclusive student engagement opportunity available to a larger subset of students. We also describe our teaching strategy, which emphasizes the social context of the classroom: discovery, self-exploration, and shared learning. Together, service learning and a critical pedagogy can better help students relate to the otherwise abstract processes of foreign aid. In 2013 and 2014, approximately 30 undergraduate students participated in a student-led outreach project soliciting bicycle donations to support human development efforts in Uganda and Ghana. In addition to making reasonable progress toward learning outcomes during the two-year pilot, we found that the everyday challenges our students encountered in their service-learning project were microcosms for some of the large-scale, global challenges that foreign aid delivery faces.