Helping the Me Generation Decenter: Service Learning with Refugees.
INTRODUCTION Recent research has empirically demonstrated that young adults today are different from prior generations in their decreased empathy, increased narcissism, and decreased civic engagement. The formative years of young adulthood are a critical period for the development of civic values and civil ideologies, a time when college age adults need to acquire the experiences and skills to decenter and develop into civic minded stewards of their communities. Engagement in service learning with individuals unlike themselves, i.e. outgroup members, is the approach we have taken at the University of North Florida to encourage this decentering through service learning engagement with refugees embedded in an honors colloquium during students' first term in college. We took a three pronged approach to the assessment of the impact of this service learning engagement. In the first approach, evaluations of student responses to open ended questions provided evidence of a reduction in their self centeredness and increases in social empathy and multicultural competence. The second approach confirmed these changes in decentering by showing that honors students who were engaged in more interactive service projects with refugees scored higher on two measures of empathy i.e. the Basic Empathy Scale Basic Empathy Scale (Jolliffe Farrington) and the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (Spreng et al. than did students engaged in less interactive service projects with refugees. In the final approach, evaluations of artifacts from the course suggested that levels of decentering, empathy, and civic action differed for students who had intensive versus superficial interactions with refugees. Taken together, findings from the three assessment approaches converged to offer support for the value of intensive and interactive service learning experiences in which students interact closely with individuals unlike themselves. We discuss implications for the impact of service learning experiences like those in the honors colloquium described here on decreasing self absorption and increasing civic engagement. We then outline limitations of the three approaches as well as the potential for future research. BACKGROUND Every generation seems to complain about the following generation. Although we are always in danger of just showing our age, college students do seem to have changed over the years as American culture has increasingly promoted individualism (Bellah et al. Twenge) Young adults also increasingly endorse materialistic values (Schor) According to the Pew Research Center in 2007, college age adults overwhelmingly reported that becoming wealthy was one of their most important goals. Another way that college students appear to have changed is increasing self centeredness, which is measured through assessments of narcissism and empathy. Narcissism is characterized by self aggrandizement, a sense of entitlement, and a lack of empathy (Campbell, Rudich, Sedikides; Twenge, Konrath, et al. The increase in narcissism in recent generations has been associated with declines in prosocial traits such as empathy, concern for others, civic orientation, and concern over social issues (e.g. Campbell, Bush, et al. Smith et al. Twenge, Campbell, Freeman) Smith and colleagues reported that 96% of Americans age 18 to 29 were uninterested in civic affairs, community activism, or politics. This same generation reported that they would be less willing to donate to charities, less interested in social programs, less willing to adjust their diets to help starving people, and less willing to change their behaviors to save energy or help with other environmental issues (Twenge, Campbell, Freeman) Similarly, a notable decrease in empathy has occurred among more recent generations (e.g. Campbell et al. Konrath et al. Several prosocial behaviors are associated with empathy: people high in empathy are more likely to engage in civic minded activities, put in volunteer hours (Unger Thumuluri) donate money to charity, give money to a homeless person, help a stranger carry belongings, or care for a friend's plants or pets (Wilhelm Bekkers)