Nadinne Cruz
Cruz addresses regional Service-Learning Conference
Nadinne Cruz, Associate
Director of the Haas Center for Public Service,
Stanford University, offered the opening plenary for "Strengthening Community
Partnerships: A Conference of Service-Learning for Social Justice in Appalachia."
The conference, held at Tusculum on June 4 and June 5, was organized by the
Service-Learning Center at Tusculum College and sponsored by the East Tennessee
Consortium for Service Learning, Learn and Serve America, and the Appalachian
College Association.
Cruz, a nationally-known expert in her field, drew on her years of experience
to address the question, "What do service-learning programs need from their
communities?" Said Tusculum College’s Director of Service-Learning,
Dr. John Reiff, "In previous work, Nadinne Cruz has pointed out that the
main thing service-learning programs need from communities is to learn what
is important to them...she has worked hard to develop a pedagogy that is based
on seeking community perspectives."
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Nadinne Cruz
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Learning through experience
As a 32-year veteran of the practice of service learning, Cruz’s beliefs
have developed through pivotal experiences in the field of volunteer service.
One of these came when she was only 18 years old, working for a group that provided
free legal assistance to subsistence farmers in her native Philippines. It was
through this experience that she learned an important lesson about perspective
and the differences in mindsets between groups of people, she said.
The peasant farmers, who existed at a low level of a highly stratified society,
Cruz said, were sugar cane plantation workers who were losing their land to
growing agribusiness. While they had little or no legal claim to the land, they
had been "squatters" there for hundreds of years, and felt like their
rights were being disregarded in the name of an indifferent economic system.
After initially seeking rights to the land through the traditional channels
of justice, the squatters lost their case and their legal counsel began the
process for an appeal. The squatters chose instead to follow their own method
of recourse, and planned a sit-in on the land in question. They gave up on this
idea, however, when their volunteer legal advisors told them that the appeal
should be won through the courts, not through such outlandish methods.
Cruz said she didn’t question the knowledge and perspective of the legal
group she worked for until the appeal failed, and the squatters lost their land
for good. The emotional scene that accompanied the disenfranchised peasants’
removal made this experience "the case study that has lived with me forever,"
she said. "It led me to open up my eyes."
What Cruz learned from the early experience was that people who are seeking
to serve or help others through difficult times must take into account the groups’
unique mindset and perspective, though it may be very different from their own.
The group of lawyers offering free services failed to take into account why
the peasants preferred a sit-in to traditional legal channels: the peasants
"had hundreds of years of experience of never winning through the legal
system," Cruz said. And, in this case, she learned, the peasant’s
own methods could have possibly been more effective.
What should a socially responsible person do about economic inequality?
Cruz, in whose native Phillipines 80% of the people live under the poverty line,
said she has become aware that there are generally two different theories of
how to answer this question. Given that there is a pyramid structure to society,
where only a small segment of people control a majority of the wealth, many
concerned citizens feel that those on the bottom levels need to be brought up
to the top, whether through education, revised tax laws, or otherwise. Conversely,
the group to which Cruz belonged in the Philippines represents a second theory.
They believe that the pyramid should be inverted, or that wealth should be made
to "trickle down" to those in the bottom rungs of society.
While working for others with the first theory in mind is considered to be "service,"
she said, working with the second theory in mind is not "service,"
but is rather "seen as a political act." Both of these theories are
at work in the service-learning field, however, and affect every aspect of service-learning
programs, from selection of staff and volunteers to the methods by which service
will be carried out.
Cruz has come to believe
that service to others will never be fully successful if those in the field
continue to see "the dimension and spectrum of service as this bipolar."
Alternatives to these two main theories must be explored, she said, offering
as an example the possibility that perhaps that the pyramid is actually spinning
in several different directions, which makes it a multi-dimensional circle more
so than a two-dimensional flat shape. "What we are still lacking is an
imaginative sense of what this [the pyramid] could be," she said.
Dystopia or Utopia?
Her own orientation to service has in the past been one of "what’s
wrong in society?" Cruz said. This view leads one to focus on inequalities
and inhumanities that are created through the well-known "systematized,
institutionalized '-isms,'" such as racism, sexism, and many others. The
dystopian view, as it is called, is one of resistance and struggle for those
stigmatized by society’s institutions in that they must fight for survival
against forces that kill, either literally or spiritually.
Dystopians who wish to be of service to the oppressed members of society will
usually have a clear consciousness of their own political stance, and where
they personally stand in society. They then often seek to become allies of society’s
oppressed members, their primary motivation being a sense of injustice, Cruz
said.
Though Cruz has been an activist in this tradition for years, she has now come
to believe that those seeking to do service to society should instead focus
on a utopian vision, "the construction of the ideal." The hope for
a utopia, she said, is that all people should be not only able to survive, but
thrive. The politics involved here are the "politics of creation,"
and service-learning students may become "civic artists" in that "the
service-learning project can be a work of art." What the students are creating,
in this case, is “a small vision of that Utopian glimmer." It will
be through imagination, a leap of faith, and starting on a small scale, Cruz
said, that students will find out how to get society to the level of a utopia
and acquire the practical skills to make it a reality.
"Partnerships among us"
Whether those in the service-learning field follow the pyramid theory or the
inverted pyramid theory, or are dystopians or utopians, they must learn to exist
together, Cruz said. Schools "need to do two parallel tracks at the same
time, and, here’s the key: they must respect each other."
Having experienced situations where the different service-learning camps do
not interact with one another, Cruz said she now sees that varying opinions
must interact to get both students and the community where they need to be.
Before a discussion about partnerships in the larger community, "we need
to start thinking about the partnerships among us," she said.
See also Regional
Service-Learning Conference Held at Tusculum College