Embracing a Möbius strip metaphor and a critical reflection framework to explore personal barriers to service-learning

Over the past thirty years, community engagement has increasingly become an important pedagogical tool for higher education practitioners. One of the most frequently utilized ways of embedding this into course design is through a practice called service-learning which provides students with opportunities to explore, engage, and contribute to the communities of which they are a part. Although service-learning projects and programs have the potential to respond to society’s most pressing needs, for some educators, this promise may be hindered by perceived personal and institutional barriers. To explore these barriers, our research group engaged in collaborative ethnography over a two-year period to nurture a space of collaboration, insight, and vulnerability. We explored two macro level categories of barriers – personal and institutional – before identifying four sub-themes within the personal category: life balance, reputational risk, cancel culture, and student reality. Our findings contribute to theory by demonstrating how the use of a Mobius strip metaphor, when viewed through four critically reflective lenses, helps educators to explore and understand the “wholeness” of the intertwining relationships between our perceived internal and external barriers to service-learning engagement.