Deborah Farrington Padilla - portfolio

Personal portfolio of writings and videos from my doctoral studies in Human Rights education and my Global Thinking teaching.

The transformative process of critical service-learning is what leads a student to act in a fully engaged manner consistent with social justice and multiculturalism. From this perspective a student can envision their power to make authentic change in society.

Service-learning is fast becoming a supplementary pedagogy for student learning. The concept of linking classroom teachings with volunteer experiences outside the classroom environment is being widely adopted as an important enrichment to the academic experience. Tutoring at an elementary school across the highway, collecting and sorting donated food for the community food bank, and collecting blankets for the homeless are a few examples of typical volunteer activities. Service-learning is considered to be a step beyond volunteerism, by including pre-experience preparation, assigned readings, classroom discussions, and reflective writings as academic experiences to deepen the volunteer experience and promote personal learning. Service-learning is being incorporated into the school experience as young as the middle school years and continuing into the university curriculum. Some service-learning advocates are moving one more step beyond the typical service-learning experience by adding deliberate analysis of the roots and structures of injustice. By observing, questioning, and researching the underlying systems that create and perpetuate the needs that are the object of the service-learning experience, students are engaging in what is now being called “critical” service-learning. Why is tutoring needed in at the particular school across the highway and not in your own? Why do people find themselves in need of food from the community food bank? Who are people that are homeless within a city enriched by so many resources, and why do they find themselves homeless? These are examples of the research questions that are being added to the service-learning experience in order to encourage critical service-learning experiences. Critical service-learning investigates the root causes, structures of injustice, and institutional systems that perpetuate social concerns; however, it is equally important for the service-learning student to analyze their own identity, assumptions, and privileges within the context of their service-learning experience. If the critical service-learning experience is to be truly transformative for all involved, then the student must be engaged in self-reflection. The student, teacher, and institution developing the service-learning experiences must understand at a deep level their own relationship to any of the roots, structures, or systems that cause and perpetuate the injustices being addressed. Specifically, understanding issues of whiteness, power, and privilege within the service-learning experience are essential aspects of a truly thorough critical analysis. This paper will focus on how whiteness, power and privilege influence high school service-learning experiences, specifically those at My Private School.

The irony of the Palestinian experience is that in the very same year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was “adopted and proclaimed” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights., n.d., p. 1) by the United Nations, so too the State of Israel was proclaimed and recognized as a sovereign member of the world of nations. The year, 1948, is momentous in that it is the anniversary of both the UDHR and the State of Israel; and in that year, the United Nations was a nascent international institution with lofty goals. According to the United Nations Charter, the United Nations is dedicated to four primary purposes: to maintain peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation in solving international problems, and be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations ("Charter, United Nations, Chapter I, Purposes and Principles," n.d.). The Preamble of the United Nations Charter, signed in 1945, foreshadows the creation of the UDHR by stating that “the peoples of the United Nations determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small” ("Charter, United Nations, Preamble," n.d.). Similarly, when the State of Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, it proclaimed: it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. ("Declaration of Israel's Independence 1948," n.d.) Thus, in 1948, just three years after the creation of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed and the State of Israel proclaimed its independence, and both were consistent with the United Nation’s founding principles. These three institutions became historically linked and challenged from their very beginnings.

The focus of this research paper is women’s development in rural India; specifically women’s empowerment programs that utilize Self Help Groups (SHGs) as their primary strategy to improve the lives of poor women. Each of these fields of study: development, poverty, gender issues, and women’s empowerment, are vast; and combined they create an enormous field of social, economic and political theory and research. I will focus my research on SHGs as dominant and effective strategies to address the gender-based inequality, deprivation, and isolation that plague so many women in rural India.