After reading Flower's article on community service, I could not help but play devil's advocate toward her point at the beginning that community service merely build personal stories of those who "serve the community", and they fail to challenge the public representations of the "others" the student serves. I don't think this is true for all students who serve the communities. True, some may only commit to these experiences because they want to feel better about themselves or they want to serve the community only so that they can say they've done it and truly "understood it" (which relates to my thoughts earlier that it is really impossible for us to understand completely the situation of the homeless and those who we think are in need just because we've never been put in that situation before). However, in the same way that each individual in the community that's in need has his or her own story and it's not effective to group them in one single category, we can't just generalize that no student wants to serve the community for its sake.

I also agree with Flower that outreach itself is a story of contradictions, good intentions, and unintended outcomes. I think that is due to the fact that we don't and probably will never fully understand the positions that the community folks are coming from. In order for that, we must be able to put ourselves in their shoes and that's just not possible because their situation is forced. The unintended outcome of community service turning into charity is only that way because it's easy to fix the symptoms. To dab at the root of the problem, maybe all we need is that understanding, not just empathy, but understanding, as if we were in this together, as one (very idealistic too).

The first thought that came to my mind about Bickford's question regarding why students shy away from activism while they increasingly turn to community service is that former takes proactive effort that seems to somewhat defy the norm of society. I think in both cases, the goal is to improve and better the community and to strive for satisfaction of everyone who lives in it. However, community service is comparable to the idea of the anonymous helper while activism may have the connotation of the abrasive and outspoken representative. It is challenging to step up and take an activist role in the community because it can be misinterpreted as civil disobedience or to aggravate a problem, but it's also not easy to serve the community while keeping in mind that it is not simply charity.

I'm very surprised at the extent of details that the articles go into because 1. I had no idea about this debate on community service and 2. there was this much scholarly research into such a simple and common phenomenon. But I do agree with Evan that these articles are important to our WRIT340 class just because we have to keep in mind the complexities of every action, word and thought that we make while going about with our own research and interactions with our community partners.