Overall, we are so excited by the high level of engagement and effort put in by everyone

in our core group of eleven participants. We are constantly learning about how to successfully
facilitate a seminar and how to engage in dialogue about poverty, care and responsibility in this
setting. This experience has allowed the three of us to re-engage with the course material and has
furthered our development as critical thinkers and peer educators. Each student offered unique
and thoughtful contributions to our group and we feel privileged for being a part of this
community.

Throughout the quarter we encouraged a dialogic learning environment by asking
questions that prompt reflection and critical thought, as opposed to stating our own beliefs. We
believe this served to help create an inclusive community. One challenge we navigated is how
much to assert our voice in the discussion. We wanted to allow space for participants to learn
from each other and have ownership over the space. However, sometimes we felt the need to
speak up more, especially in response to untroubled conclusions about who is poor and why. We
did notice that by the latter weeks of seminar, we were able to take even more of a hands-off
approach as students became more practiced at relational and care-ethical engagement.

Initially, we set out to accommodate everyone who expressed interest in participating.
While this was rooted in our desire to be inclusive, we encountered some difficulties because of
it. We had a core group of people who were committed to consistently preparing for and
participating in seminar. We had one student drop in and out unpredictably without preparation
(doing the readings) or notice. This had a negative effect on the sense of community that the core
group has worked hard to develop. This is not to say that we recommend not accommodating
specific individuals circumstances, rather, that there is a certain level of commitment necessary
from each participant in order to build a community that is ultimately inclusive.

Week by Week

Week 2:
Reading: Poverty Manifesto by Dr. Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, RPN Blog post by Elyse
Activity: Introductions, Community Agreements, KUOW podcast: Do you Give to Panhandlers?
Positive moments: The podcast sparked a really good discussion for our first meeting. Because
the podcast was so personal, people were extremely reflective about their own lives and
perspectives while also working to engage in relational poverty thought. This helped build a
foundation for our community environment and helped people start to re-imagine poverty
through a critical lens.

Week 3:
Reading: Common Sense: Neoliberalism

Activity: Jessica and Olivia facilitators with A. Roys Can We Shop to End Poverty video,
collaborative timeline of neoliberalism
Positive moments:
One of the highlights of the course is the diversity of perspectives represented in the group,
particularly in terms of nationality. One example of how this enriches our class is the
cross-cultural timeline of neoliberalism we created in week 3. We wanted to talk about the
historical context of neoliberalism and as we created a timeline it was enhanced with events from
many countries.

Week 4:
Reading: Chapter 1 of Masseys Spatial Divisions of Labor
Activity: Students wrote Oscar speeches thanking the individuals, organizations, and
institutions who provided the care that helped them get to where they are today. We then
debriefed by talking about trends we saw in the people, places and nature of care.
Positive moments: Everyone shared their Oscar speech with the group! A testament to both
community strength and individual engagement. One student expressed how she had never
thought about care as existing outside the family and the home before.

Week 5:
Reading: The Geographies of Care and Responsibility
Activity: Marilyn facilitator, Steven Colbert clip on domestic workers, textual analysis of articles
Positive moments:
We had some of the richest written reflections and seminar discussions thus far. Our seminar
participants deeply engaged with the reading and Marilyn posed some great discussion questions
during her facilitation. A lot of the students engaged in deep critical reflection on how the
privatization of care and caring across distance are apparent in their lives. One student brought
up the idea that people often engage in caring for distant others because it is easier to obscure
your own responsibilities for inequality.

Week 6:
Reading: Paradigms of Propertied Citizenship by Ananya Roy
Activity: Snejana and Stella facilitators, looking at ways homelessness is understood around the
world, Ghana Think Tank.
Positive moments: Snejana and Stella put a lot of effort into planning their activity which was
great to see. As a class we were able to identify some of the dominant discourses on poverty and
homelessness around the world. The Ghana Think Tank video gave us an opportunity to explore
the concept of caring across distance and pose third world questions on first world
processes; a theme prevalent in both the video and the reading.


Week 7:
Reading: The Personal is Political by Caitlin Cahill
Activity: Miah and Olivia facilitated a discussion, Fed Up Honeys website, discussion on
participatory action research and feminist epistemology
Positive moments: The Fed Up Honeys website materialized an alternative form of approaching
research.
Note: After reading this weeks reflection, we thought it would be beneficial for the group to
discuss feminist epistemological approaches in relation to Cahills piece. Looking back we
would consider adding a short article on positivism and feminist epistemology to pair with The
Personal is Political, so that we could incorporate methodology into our seminar discussion.


Week 8:
Reading: One Pack = One Vaccine = one global motherhood? A feminist analysis of ethical
consumption by Hawkins
Activity: As a group we watched the One Pack = One Vaccine Pampers commercial, Alexa
facilitated the discussion using her friends reactions to the commercial and Youtube comments
to highlight the importance to engaging with this piece of media (and caring across distance
more broadly) using a care ethical analysis. For the second half of seminar, students conducted
interviews with each other about their service learning activities, more specifically, the questions
focused on understanding their organizations and their positions using a care ethical analysis.
We created some prompting questions to inspire the discussion (See below).
Positive moments: Students found this activity beneficial and appropriate as they were working
on their final papers. It was really exciting to see students engage in care ethical thought about
their service positions.

Week 9:
Reading: Broke not Broken by Tony Sparks
Activity: Sawami and Sakiko were the facilitators, discussion and activity on homelessness in the
context of human rights, discourse analysis, class discussion.
Positive moments: Sawami and Sakiko did a great job of finding articles that covered a wide
range of issues in regards to homelessness. We saw a notable transformation in the way people
engaged with the topic of homelessness in comparison to the Week 2 activity. We spent the
second part of class talking about how we as a group wanted to get out of our final meeting
during week 10. We thought this was a really wonderful instance of collaboration about the
direction of the seminar.

Week 10:

Activity: Potluck! We began class by summarizing the main takeaways of the course, each
student was responsible for summarizing the themes for the week they facilitated. Afterwards
we discussed how students could continue engaging with the course themes/goals outside of
class. We did a group brainstorm to come up with working definitions of alliance and activism.


Service Learning Interview Prompts:

How does your service learning practice caring about?
Does your organization understand the populations need for care from a relational
perspective? From a residual understanding of poverty? What evidence do you have to
support this?

How does your service learning embody taking care of?
Are there elements of the organization that dont involve directly working with the
population?
How is your organization funded?

How does your service learning practice giving care?
How do they assess and attempt to meet the needs of the people they work with?
What are some experiences youve had giving care?
How do they define what population they give care to? What populations are excluded
that might be able to use the services?
How does your organization reach out to these populations?

How does your service learning practice care receiving?
What forms of feedback do they have in place?
Do they engage in a dialogue about their services with their clients?