Abstract
Background: This paper describes findings from research conducted on students who participated in a service-learning course in South Africa. Objective The study aimed to understand how participants constructed their experiences of service-learning and to interrogate their emotional investments in these constructions.
Method: Data were collected and analyzed using a psychosocial methodology, consisting of discursive and psychoanalytic readings of interview transcripts, reflective journal entries, and researcher field notes.
Results: The discursive findings focus on how participants employed liberal traditional learning discourses to construct service-learning as linear resulting in subject positions that reinforced prejudices and the power structures supporting these. A psychoanalytic reading of the data suggests that participants invested in these constructions to defend against their own anxiety related to uncertainty and guilt about privilege in an unfamiliar context.
Conclusion: Students invest in liberal traditional discourses of service-learning for defensive reasons, which can be understood as arising from the intersubjective and social context in which the service-learning takes place.
Teaching Implications: Recognizing prejudice as emanating from anxiety generated by the affective work required for service-learning means thinking creatively about how to both contain and allow this affective work to take place in service-learning activities.