Textbooks and Teaching

Re-Visioning Women's History through
Service Learning

Catherine Badura

Teaching women's history in southwest Georgia, I commonly hear statements such as "I didn't even know they had a history," and "So, do you also teach men's history?" So I have embraced the risk of "teaching outside the box," chancing that it is a risk worth taking. My academic institution, Valdosta State University, fifteen miles north of the Georgia-Florida state line, has a student body of just under nine thousand; 75 percent are white, 21 percent African American, and 4 percent "other." The school serves primarily a forty-one-county area of south Georgia, an area known for diverse pecan types but not for much cultural diversity. A small Asian and Hispanic population barely challenges an ingrained perception that people, issues, and history are largely black and white. Many students see any course prefaced by "women" as either too radical (so they react), or not "real" history (so they do not have to take it seriously). My courses in women's history include rigorous reading and writing assignments that exceed the local norm and disabuse them of the latter attitude. Service work often disarms the former and opens students to learning some of the lessons of history.	1
For the past four years students in two of my U.S. women's history courses—a course on women activists and a survey from 1869 to the present—have had the option of working fifteen to twenty hours in one of several community agencies that serve, and are directed by, women. Students who choose the service option conclude by writing a paper relating the service to course objectives, the readings, and other topics covered in lectures and class discussions. The alternative to service work is a lengthy, more traditional research paper. Not surprisingly, most students choose service work.	2
In my approach, service does not replace reading and writing about the historical subject, and I am not suggesting that service is equally valuable in all courses, for all fields, or for all students. Nonetheless, where I have used it (after all, women's history was born "outside the box"), I have found it particularly effective at collapsing the cultural barriers that create "us" and "them" thinking. The service projects are carefully designed to push students to think critically about the ways time, place, and circumstance have intersected to shape women. By linking praxis and theory through experience, service can be especially effective in the discipline of history.	3
Moreover, the service component I create differs fundamentally from the community service students carry out as members of sororities or fraternities. Students who have had both experiences quickly surmise the difference and often mention it in class or in writing. Among other substantive differences, service required for course work generally leads to direct contact with the dispossessed. Students report that sororities generally screen them from direct interaction. The goal of including service as course work is to educate and transform the student and, by inference, society; the goal in other settings is most frequently charity.	. . .