Participants

All 123 participants were Bonner Scholars at Rhodes College, a small liberal arts college in an urban setting with about 2,000 undergraduate students. The Bonner Scholars Program aims to provide college access to students with a passion for service and social justice. Rhodes is part of a national network of 65 colleges and universities that are supported by the Bonner Foundation. Fifteen students are admitted each year; 85% of each class must have an estimated family contribution at or below $6,000; and twice as many students of color are in each Bonner class compared with the college’s incoming class as a whole. Bonner Scholars have a service requirement of 10 hours per week during the school year and two full summers of service. Supported by both the national Bonner network and the college, students participate in regular training and reflection. The Bonner Program aims to support students’ development as citizens through their service work, in conjunction with their academic learning. The integration of these knowledge bases has the potential to create meaningful change in the community as well as to foster the development of individual citizens who maintain a commitment to service and community development.

Cultivating a Research Team and Collaborative Participation

Two senior members of our research team (the first and last authors of this article) began this work in conversation with the campus director of the Bonner Program. In accordance with PAR practice, initial research questions and data collection plans emerged from these conversations and were refined in continuing conversations that incorporated more stakeholders. The senior team members took responsibility for recruiting and coordinating team members and research activities. Typically, team members included six student researchers, recruited from research courses and by current team members. These student researchers included at least two Bonner Scholars. Students usually joined the team in their third or fourth semester and continued through graduation. Team members facilitated data collection and data management and constituted an interpretive community, meeting weekly to discuss research and theory and to work with data together. Our process in constituting, training, and learning with this research team is described in detail in an earlier publication (Thomas et al., 2019). The authors of the current article are members of the Community Narrative Research Team. Two are faculty members, three are recent graduates (now in graduate school), and three are current undergraduates who have been a part of the research effort for two or more years.

Narrative Data Collection

Twice a year, Bonner students attend Bonner retreats in which they engage in programming intended to provide support and training, strengthen cohort bonds, and guide reflection. At Bonner retreats, we ask students to build upon their established weekly reflective practice through storytelling. We ask them to write and share narratives with one another in response to prompts designed to elicit meaningful reflection. In the fall retreat, we ask scholars to “please write about a situation related to your community service that felt particularly meaningful to you,” and in the spring retreat, we ask them to “please write about a situation that felt particularly awkward and you were not sure what to do.” Over four years, we collected 403 stories from 123 Bonner Scholars. On each occasion of narrative data collection, we explained the research project and asked each student author for written consent to include their story in our research. Only stories from students who provided this consent are included in the corpus of data. Their stories have not been edited for spelling or grammar. Although several students were absent for at least one of the data collections, none declined to give consent at every data collection. The institutional review board at our institution approved all the described procedures before initial data collection, and we have changed names and some details to protect confidentiality.

Participatory Data Collection

During the four years in which we gathered narratives and over the following three years of assessing the data, members of our research team were in constant communication with current Bonner Scholars. Representatives from the team attended monthly Bonner meetings and once or twice a year made presentations about our ongoing work with the stories, seeking input from current Bonner Scholars about our interpretations. We have sustained conversation with the Bonner Leadership Team, a body of six students who work in the Bonner office, planning, coordinating, and troubleshooting events and programs. This communication served as member checking and has ensured that our considerations of the narratives are responsive to current programming concerns. Notes from these meetings constitute both data and data analysis, informing our interpretation.

Corpus Selection

In order to select stories in which academic themes were present, we used the word search feature of NVivo qualitative data analysis software. Stories that contained words associated with school, class, or academics were then independently evaluated by four team members to determine whether the use of these words in each story was relevant and meaningful. For example, a story that used the word course to refer to a three-course meal would be excluded from the subset. Interrater reliability was acceptable, with percent agreement among the coding pairs ranging from 87.5% to 94.6%. All discrepancies were resolved by discussion with the larger team. This process resulted in a set of 70 stories in which student authors mentioned both academics and community engagement. Chi-square tests showed no significant differences between these 70 stories and the full set of 403 in gender or race and ethnicity of the authors.

Interpretive and Thematic Analysis of Narratives

The inductive work of identifying themes in the corpus was done in iterative steps, using a modified open coding procedure (Charmaz, 2005) in which pairs of team members worked with small sets of stories, bringing recurring themes to the whole team for discussion. This included conversations with Bonner Scholars who were a part of our interpretive community. Our preliminary interpretations were shared with members of the Bonner Leadership Team. As we began to reach saturation, in that these discussions were not bringing new insights, we twice brought a progress report to a monthly Bonner meeting so that we could apply pertinent insights and elaborations made by current Bonner Scholars to the narratives written by earlier cohorts. This process led us to define the story features presented in Tables 1 and 2. In multiple rounds of focused coding, five members of the research team worked in pairs to note each instance of these themes in the 70 stories selected.

Coders noted whether, at any point in the story, the student author wrote about applying course material in their community work (classroom to community). Intercoder reliability on identifying these occasions ranged from k = .612 to k = .634 for the different pairs of coders. Within this category, we noted three subthemes. These were identified by independent pairs of coders, and discrepancies were resolved in discussion with the research team. We distinguished reports of applying skills (e.g., language translation, computer programming, and research skills) from reports of applying course concepts (knowledge or vocabulary associated with or attributed to a class or an academic major). We also identified a subset of these stories in which the student authors discussed academic work or course obligations as interference in community service because of time or energy constraints.

Coders also noted whether, at any point in the story, the student author wrote about applying knowledge, skills, or insights achieved in their community work to any on-campus endeavor, including classes or campus organizing (community to campus). Intercoder reliability on identifying these occasions ranged from k = .7 to k = .8 for the different pairs of coders. Two subthemes noted in these stories were identified by pairs of coders who resolved discrepancies with the research team. In some stories, Bonner Scholars noted that community work advanced their own academic goals or helped them with course performance. This included opportunities to practice career-relevant skills or to do class projects. These stories were distinguished from those in which the student author’s community experience was shared to the benefit of classmates or of campus organizations (e.g., a committee advancing interfaith understanding, the training of residence advisors).

Stories included in our corpus that described neither campus-to-community nor community-to-campus connections were also identified and formed a critical part of our subsequent exploration.

From the Classroom to the Community

Of the 70 narratives that described academic work in a story about community service, 52.9% (n = 37) did so by reporting the application of material from the classroom to their work in the community. We recognized three ways these connections were made.

From the Community Back to the Classroom

Of the 70 narratives that described academic work in a story about community service, 45.7% (n = 32) reported the application of knowledge or skills developed in the community to their on-campus lives. We recognized three ways these connections were made.

Community and Classroom Fail to Connect

In 14 of the 32 community-to-campus stories (20% of our corpus), students described knowledge production or clear insights gained in their community work, and they talked about their academic engagement without making any connection between the two. In some ways, these stories were the most generative of discussion and insight in our interpretive community. They led us to raise questions with our Bonner Scholars about times they might have contributed their expertise in the classroom but declined to do so. The 14 “no connection” stories we read and the notes from discussion with Bonner Scholars on this topic raise three possible reasons why students may keep the academic and community domains separate.

The first of these reasons came up in Example 5, discussed within the context of the “identity clash” stories. This was the topic of several discussions with Bonner Scholars. Students sometimes felt as though their experiences were so different from those of their classmates that there was not enough common ground to support conversation. In team meetings, Bonner students explained that these identity/climate issues contribute to their hesitation to bring their experiences up in classroom settings. Several students struggled, as did the student author of Example 5, to not “look down on” their classmates whose lives have been so sheltered or whose vision of the world is so limited that they do not understand the problems encountered by people “outside the gates.”

A second, related obstacle was the doubt students expressed about whether the insights and knowledge they achieved in their community work would be valued as contributions in their classrooms. As one Bonner Scholar explained, “you already feel like you do not really fit, so it is scarier to share information that you feel will not be respected.” A classroom climate dictates not only what is considered credible knowledge but also who is considered credible in their transmission of their knowledge. Bonner students acknowledge this, consistently telling us that in our campus climate, their identities as students, Bonner Scholars, and—oftentimes—minoritized students are deeply intertwined with the ways in which their class contributions are likely to be misunderstood or devalued.

We identified a potential third obstacle that is more complex and subtle. Our participation in program planning and our discussion with Bonner Scholars about their reluctance to share their experience in classes led us to recognize a conflict between an imperative to cultivate humility and an imperative to claim the authority of one’s own experience. Bonner programming, and indeed much of the content in critical service learning courses, emphasizes the cultivation of listening skills and a respect for the subject positions occupied by people who are living with the problems we seek to address. We saw in our narratives several occasions in which students express mindfulness of their own privilege. For example, one student wrote, “I never am completely sure how my privilege as a hearing person is going to come across to the people with whom I am speaking.” In a very powerful example of the success of efforts to encourage student respect for community members, a student describes 140 hours of research and careful preparation in support of a community effort to reclaim a school designated as “failing” by the state. This student author describes organizing a critical meeting between school board members, parents, and state officials:

Example 6. … I stood in the back and realized the complete lack of experience I had with this issue … Even though I have researched, studied and worked with the issue of inner city public education and the challenges it faces both in Memphis and [home city] for most of my time at Rhodes, I saw that I failed to grasp or relate to the reality faced by some of the most at-risk consumers of this system.

In the 30 minutes allotted for sharing a narrative, this student wrote over a thousand words describing the conflict they felt between a sense of responsibility to share their expertise and a sense of responsibility to listen to others “who had so much personal experience and investment in this issue.”

An imperative to listen more than talk, however appropriate for students in their community settings, may be cultivating an inclination to silence the self that is brought back into the classroom, where this student’s insights and expertise are seriously needed. We want our Bonner Scholars to claim the authority of their experience and to contribute their knowledge in classroom spaces, but our programming may be inadvertently suppressing students’ recognition of their own authority.

In the four stories in which Bonner students did discuss bringing their expertise from the community back to campus, they did so in co-curricular rather than classroom activities. Indeed, our Bonner Scholars often take leadership roles on campus. Nevertheless, they expressed doubts in these stories about whether their ideas were respected by campus administrators and about whether their efforts to promote institutional improvement were appreciated. In one of these narratives, a student writes about a meeting in which they attempted to convince administrators to better represent community engagement opportunities during the orientation week for first-year students:

Example 7.… Students are socially and culturally influenced by administration and faculty, so we knew that this would be an important way to integrate community service into the lives of students … We had an incredibly successful meeting yesterday, and we decided together that an entire day be dedicated to service for the first-years. This is a huge improvement over the 15 minutes we have had in the past. I was very encouraged by the outcome of this meeting, and I still am. However, while we were exiting, I noticed a sketch calendar from a planning meeting that had occurred before our meeting with [administrator]. It already had “service day” written in on one of the days. This confused me a lot, because we had not spoken with him until that very meeting. It upset me to think that we may have only been successful because that was something an administrator had already decided, and not something that our efforts and our desires as students and student leaders produced. It made me wonder: are our ideas about what is best for this school respected as we thought they were in that meeting?

This student author expresses confusion at the behavior of an administrator, calling into question this person’s authenticity. They tell of going into the meeting believing that their ideas were respected but coming out feeling as though that respect was just a pretense and that student leadership did not actually matter. The dialogue that took place in the meeting, the student author realizes, was a pretense, designed to make the students feel as though they were a part of decision-making, when the decisions had actually been made before the meeting. Experiences such as these are likely to depress the inclination that students have to bring back to campus the leadership skills they are developing in their service sites.

Bringing Community Into the Classroom: Whose Knowledge Counts

In order to address the problems identified above, we must reconsider both what knowledge is seen as classroom worthy and who is considered able to produce such knowledge. This requires a critical examination of the way in which we devalue the knowledge of those outside of the academy and position students as passive recipients of faculty expertise. Pereira (2017) connected this devaluation to larger power structures in society, writing that “the assessment of particular people as less able to produce proper scientific knowledge is reflective of macro-structures of power where they occupy a subordinate position, and is also in itself a form of subordination” (p. 56). The makeup of the city of Memphis, in addition to the demographics of the Bonner Program at Rhodes College, makes this power analysis all the more essential. The institution’s location in a majority minority city means that many of the community members that Bonners are working with are likely to “occupy a subordinate position” as a result of racism and classism. Here, as in many college towns, poverty and nonwhiteness are associated with “the outside community,” whereas the academic institution embodies wealth and whiteness. Critical service learning pedagogy recognizes that positioning students and academics as the “experts” in service sites who can “fix” community problems is counterproductive and oppressive (Mitchell, 2008), but many stop short of positioning community members as experts who produce knowledge that not only is important to the betterment of their own community but is also worthy of consideration in the classroom.

Yosso (2005) argued that although those who have theorized power and oppression (e.g., Bourdieu, 1986) have noted the forms of capital that are valued in academia and are most freely available to the children of the privileged, they have failed to notice the community/cultural wealth that is prominent in marginalized communities. For example, one form of community/cultural wealth identified by Yosso that holds exceptional possibilities for bringing community-constructed understanding into the classrooms is resistance capital. This form of capital refers to the skills developed in marginalized communities that are deployed against inequality and oppression. Many of our students are working in off-campus communities with a rich history of resistance to racial, economic, and gender oppression, the very forms of oppression that they may be studying in their college classrooms. We have seen students write in their narratives about the courage and wisdom of the people they meet at their service sites. The powerful examples of resistance they have observed off campus ought to inform and enrich classroom conversations that focus almost exclusively on the obstacles these communities face.

We may have made more progress toward preparing our students to go out in the community with respect for the forms of community/cultural capital that Yosso identified than we have made in preparing the professoriate to receive and to honor these sources of wealth.

Our findings suggest that many of our Bonner Scholars have cultivated an attitude of respect they take into the community and that this sets them up well to honor the community/cultural wealth they find there. We must consider whether they bring that humility back into the classroom in a way that silences them. In addition to teaching our students to approach community partners with humility, we must encourage them to have confidence in the understanding achieved in their collaborations. We want them to have enough humility off campus to foster genuine collaboration and enough confidence on campus to share their expertise.

This issue is compounded by the fact that students bringing such knowledge into the classroom tend to be viewed as recipients, not producers or transmitters of knowledge. What’s more, many Bonner students themselves belong to marginalized groups. A Bonner student in a classroom already faces a challenge of sharing knowledge produced with community members outside of the academy. In such a role, they may be viewed as a border-crossing agent, or a student doing boundary work (McMillan, 2011; Pereira, 2017; Ross, 2012). Their social positionality, however, may afford them more credibility on one side of the boundary than the other, and their dual participation may serve to diminish their credibility on both. If that Bonner Scholar is both a student of color and from a low-income background, their very presence in the classroom represents a breach in the boundary between community and campus, and they are even less likely to be granted authority in the classroom. The campus climate that Bonner students write about in their narratives and discuss in meetings is inextricably linked to oppressive societal power structures—which are both reflective of and perpetuated by the continued denial of epistemic authority of marginalized groups within the academy. More faculty recognition of the cultural/community wealth that students bring to the classroom by virtue of their off-campus experience and by virtue of their own backgrounds may serve to disrupt these norms (Yosso, 2005).

Bridging Institutional Divisions: Whose Expertise Is Valued

Another, related barrier to integration of “academic” and “community” learning may be institutional. The demarcation of what is and is not classroom-worthy knowledge is reflected in administrative divisions within institutions of higher education themselves. This can be seen in the long-standing struggle to bridge the work of student affairs and academic affairs in a meaningful way to support student development. This institutional divide is one that many are still trying to navigate to promote successful collaboration (LePeau, 2015). As a co-curricular program with objectives for both student learning and growth as well as structural and community change, the Bonner Scholars Program does not fit neatly into one of these two institutional structures. While the program provides an opportunity for collaboration across the divide, continued silo-ing of academic and student affairs may interfere with the realization of the program objectives. One reported barrier to this collaboration is a “perceived value difference” between student affairs and academic affairs, with the work done by student affairs and staff members often being perceived as secondary or inferior to the work of academic affairs or the scholarship of faculty (LePeau, 2015; Syno et al., 2019).

As we work toward holistic student learning and development through community and civic engagement, we must interrogate an academic history and culture that contribute to the devaluation of both the experiential learning facilitated by student affairs and the community-based knowledge students learn from, or co-produce with, community members (Yosso, 2005). To do so, we must challenge the enduring notions of knowledge production and expertise both within and outside of academia. This imperative can manifest in many ways. One such way would be a commitment to pedagogies, such as FoK, that are rooted in counter-hegemonic social justice aims. If faculty genuinely respect the knowledge and experience students gain in their off-campus work, students might be less likely to see their community work as competing with their academic goals. The student who felt conflicted by a choice to “abandon the kids that I have spent a year building trust and relationships with” or to sweep “my academic dreams under the rug” might be encouraged in a plan to integrate their interest in health education for refugee children with work in on-campus health sciences courses.

One solution proposed in the student affairs and academic affairs collaboration literature is a change in the organizational structures and incentive mechanisms used by institutions of higher education. For example, engaged learning and scholarship with undergraduate students and community partners are not valued in many institutions, as they do not clearly fall in one of the “buckets” of faculty work. In such a context, accomplishments that integrate service, teaching, and scholarship—such as institutionally supported centers for community engagement that bring together staff, faculty, and student expertise—are confounding to an evaluation system that relies on three separate scores for teaching, research, and service. Furthermore, faculty are rewarded primarily for scholarly research and contributions to their narrow fields of study, and this work is often carried out in isolation or with limited collaboration (LePeau, 2015). In general, little importance is placed on collaboration in faculty culture (Syno et al., 2019).

Reward structures remain out of sync with institutional values and strategic goals in many cases, and faculty and staff workload is already quite heavy. Faculty and staff may be more motivated to engage in community engaged scholarship if it counts explicitly as such and as it is connected explicitly to key issues facing institutions and campus-wide initiatives already underway. For example, our college is one of many taking stock and engaging in college-wide work around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Senior-level leadership has drafted a guiding document that expands on our strategic plan and lays out specific priorities and initiatives (Turner, 2021). We see multiple roles for faculty, staff, and student leaders who can contribute to these collaborative institutional efforts.

We see student expertise that arises from the integration of academic and community-based learning as central to these efforts. For example, professional development for faculty and staff to equip them to support our diverse and changing student body could include attendance at Bonner Scholar capstone presentations. Each year, graduating Bonner Scholars present incredibly rich reflections on community engaged learning and leadership. These are open to the entire community but are attended by only a few faculty members, who come as a gesture of support for their students. These events should be considered faculty development opportunities with the expectation that faculty and academic affairs professionals attend to learn from the presentations, not simply to support or evaluate the students.

As we envision diversity and equity in our campus life and community, we may look to Bonner Scholars and other student leaders from Memphis who could serve as teaching assistants for community engagement courses, helping to teach and model skills needed for democratic citizenship, community building, and productive engagement with others. Our students are doing impressive work to integrate what they learn in their classes with what they are trying to accomplish in their on- and off-campus communities. If we recognize students, staff, and community members as collaborators in knowledge production and institutional change efforts, we will benefit from the work they do and more fully recognize our aspirations for democratic and transformative undergraduate education. Finally, if we wish to facilitate holistic student learning and development in a way that truly prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is not enough to simply teach critical epistemologies and cultural humility: we must also value diverse funds of knowledge and further democratize institutional practices.