Abstract

Team-teaching an interdisciplinary service learning course with an applied international education component poses many challenges for instructors, students, and community partners. Our experience formed the basis of a case study that allowed us to analyze the challenges of bringing together participants with diverging theoretical approaches. The course, HIV/AIDS in East Africa, brought together students and instructors from the disciplines of journalism and mass communication, and political science. It consisted of a team-taught semester-long class, a three week trip to Tanzania, and two weeks of post-trip production work. The class had two main goals: 1) provide students with a knowledge base about HIV/AIDS and poverty issues in sub-Saharan Africa; and 2) prepare them for a service learning trip that combined field work through participant observation and documentary production to write grants, create promotional materials, and produce a web site for our partner organization, the Ilula Orphan Program. Although we, as instructors, agreed upon our goals and plan for the course, our different disciplinary perspectives and those of our students became apparent on the first day of class. The journalism and mass communication group interpreted the issues through the lens of constructing compelling personal narratives while the interpretation of the political science group focused on the importance of power structures as a means of understanding and representation. Through hours of debate and discussion in the classroom and in the field, we realized this creative tension could not be resolved fully. We did, however, find common ground and this provided opportunities to interrogate the weaknesses and strengths of our own approaches and enabled us to apply multiple strategies in confronting complex problems.