Teaching within war in Ukraine: applying an ethic of care lens to extend our understanding of service-learning theory and praxis

Service-learning is an educational approach that has become part of the higher education landscape. Although research and scholarship in this area has flourished over the past thirty years, little is known about higher education teachers’ experiences when using service-learning within war. Utilizing interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), we explore this gap by interviewing university teachers living and working in Ukraine who incorporated service-learning into their courses within the first 1.5 years following the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Using a double hermeneutic approach, we draw a set of practice themes from their lived experience reflections. To better understand the underlying relationships among the practice themes and their fit within a context of war, we examine them through an ethic of care lens. The results offer novel insights and extend our understanding of the intersections between service-learning and care in two ways: (1) identifying a set of practices drawn from the reflections of higher education teachers who used service-learning in their courses within an environment of war and (2) contextualizing the resultant service-learning practices within an ethic of care framework to extend our understanding of service-learning theory and praxis.