Help (not) wanted: Neo-liberal discourses of leadership against community knowledge and control in comparative context

Introduction

This article compares two neo-liberal education reform activities that are not often studied in tandem: alternative teacher certification in the USA, as explored through Teach for America (TFA), and the growing international service learning (ISL) movement. Guided by the Movement for Black Lives’ (2018) call for a world where those “most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us,” we explore the ways in which both of these kinds of program use neo-liberal justifications to erode and delegitimize community control by obscuring the authority, history, and agency of the communities they purport to serve, while convincing people outside of the community that those within are benefitted by this work.

Neo-liberalism is a “theory of political, economic practices grounded in the belief that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005: 2). The role of the neo-liberal state is to “create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (Harvey, 2005: 2) by promoting deregulation, the elimination of tariffs, and a range of monetary and social policies favorable to business (Brown, 2003: 3). Neo-liberal ideology “aggressively attempts to break the power of unions, decouple income from productivity, subordinate the needs of society to the market, reduce civic education to job training, and render public services and amenities as unconscionable luxury” (Giroux, 2004: 249). These values prompt the state to withdraw its financial assistance and managerial hand from social sectors such as welfare, education, and health care (Harvey, 2005: 66).

Since its rise to prominence in the 1970s, neo-liberal ideology has “served as the often invisible and supposedly objective worldview within which social, economic, and political challenges are reduced from complex conceptual issues to technical problems” that require only the “guiding hand of market forces” and individual self-interest to solve (Lahann and Mitescu Reagan, 2011: 9). According to Harvey (2005: 3), this narrative has had “pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.” Neo-liberal ideology, in other words, is now hegemonic.

In keeping with this ideology, teacher staffing by TFA in the Global North (and, by extension, around the world through TFA’s affiliate program, Teach for All) and short-term service projects completed by university students in the Global South are both advanced by their proponents as rational solutions to the problems they aim to address: the educational “opportunity gap” in the US public education system and “underdevelopment” in the Global South, respectively. But in casting these approaches as inherently rational and effective, and the individuals and organizations that carry them out as morally neutral, TFA and many ISL programs diminish the complexities of the “problems” they aim to address and the communities they purport to serve. In the name of neediness and scarcity on the part of local school districts and families, TFA represents its corps members as benevolent benefactors, despite inadequate preparation and their being paid as professionals. Similarly, many university ISL programs narrate their work as “helping” or bringing development to a faraway land, which not only presumes ignorance and need on the part of local people, but also fails to account for the relative lack of knowledge and skills possessed by the student service providers.

The comparisons we draw in this article between TFA and these international study-abroad programs aim to highlight the ways in which deficit orientations permeate different contexts, local and global, to perpetuate and normalize privatization and the wresting of control from communities. In making this comparison, we aim to better understand what these programs have in common: a world view that is best understood as white supremacist in that it is rooted in the presumption that privileged white people and their traditions of knowledge and action are naturally positioned to define and respond to the purported problems of others, not expressed in their own terms. In fact, this globalization of “helping” may actually increase the difficulty of those targeted by such “help” to speak in their own terms.

Why this article? Why now?

The seeds of this article, a reflective essay that integrates prior experience (Lesnick, 2017) and qualitative research (Bahn, 2014) with a comparative conceptual approach, were planted in 2012 when we traveled together to Northern Ghana as teacher and student—members of an interdisciplinary course cluster that studied child development through the lenses of psychology, education, and literature. In Ghana, we engaged for one week with local community members at a village preschool and kindergarten—a non-governmental organization that had invited connection with our education program. There, we explored what it means, as Lesnick (2017:10) writes elsewhere, to work “within, and with a consciousness of, differences in access to wealth and resources, resulting from relationships of power that encompass all.”

This initial visit has grown into a summer action research fellowship, now in its sixth year, in which eight students from two liberal arts colleges (consortial partners where Lesnick teaches) work with four students from the University for Development Studies in Ghana (for a fuller discussion of this program, see Lesnick (2017)). The Lagim Tehi Tuma/Thinking Together program (LTT) is expressly trying not to replicate the ISL model we interrogate here, though it must always wrestle with its possible and imagined connections to that model. Led by Lesnick and Local Coordinator, Alhassan Sumaila, LTT is designed to serve as a platform on which the college/university students join with local mentors and colleagues to consider questions of education, history, identity, and culture in the context of post-colonial power relationships. LTT wrestles directly with the “white-savior” complex (Cole, 2012), US triumphalism and exceptionalism, and voluntourism (Robertson, 2014). By engaging students in regular, academically informed reflective discussion as they undertake introductory language learning and educational internships at the preschool/kindergarten, with a community radio station, in a computer literacy training center, and with a dance and drumming group, LTT fosters unlearning and rethinking—the identification of myths, gaps, and distortions in participants’ understandings of development, inequity, and difference with respect to the ongoing impacts of enslavement, colonialism, and racialized identities (Hartman, 2006; Pierre, 2012).

LTT fosters the unlearning and rethinking of received knowledge in several ways. One is by giving time and resources to local language study in order to make it harder for students to assume that English is the only or best context for engagement. This encourages them to respect the role of language in culture and the bilingualism and multilingualism of many people they interact with in Ghana. A second is by building academic reading and discussion into the program, both in the USA and in Ghana. A third is by engaging and compensating local people, with a reliable and transparent budget structure, to serve as program coordinators, language teachers, internship mentors, and guest speakers on a range of topics. A fourth is by building regular reflection sessions into the entire program so that the participants meet to discuss problematic issues, experiences, and questions, supported by a committee leadership structure shared by the Ghanaian and American students, and comprising communications, health/safety, and budget committees to encourage the voicing of difficult issues. As a summer internship with a non-governmental organization or agency is a graduation requirement for University for Development Studies students, this experience counts towards their degree, is overseen by their professor, and culminates in a written research report they each prepare. The US students participate in a three-week pre-travel academic and team-building orientation and write internship and committee reports, as well as reflective essays, at the end of the program. They also agree to take a post-summer course back on campus to support their continued learning from and about the summer experience.

Finally, a way to keep alert to the complexity of this work is by thinking about it as, in Minh-ha Trinh’s (1982) terms, “reassemblage,” and thus avoid becoming overly attached to any one form it takes or prescriptive about how it is done. In other words, remaining open to new inputs, ideas, critiques, and changes, rather than bureaucratizing the process, enables creative evolution, mid-course correction, and learning from mistakes, failures, and experiences. This article is one instance of this goal.

An earlier article by one of us grappled with similar questions of power, and differential access to resources, agency, and voice. Two years after our first visit to Ghana, I (Bahn) wrote my senior anthropology thesis on TFA, using an in-depth content analysis of TFA’s marketing materials and interviews with undergraduate students who were applying to the organization. I explored the ways in which TFA drew on neo-liberal conceptions of education and citizenship—which valorized private, market-based solutions to the educational “achievement gap” in the USA’s public schools and encouraged prospective corps members to “make a difference” and “be a force for change,” all while marketing the personal benefits to TFA corps members—to set the members of its corps in opposition to “traditional” teachers and the communities they purported to serve. The narratives I uncovered in this domestic context, of benevolent benefactors “serving” grateful (though faceless) recipients, mirrored those that Lesnick and I witnessed (and actively sought to avoid) in our work in Ghana.

Many years later, while pursuing a Master’s degree in public service, I (Bahn) found myself once more confronting an organization that, like TFA, prescribes privatized, technical solutions onto another community while casting its members as too needy to be anything but grateful. Because I was an educator when not in school myself, I was counseled to complete my international public service project, a requirement of my program, with a public university semester-abroad program. The program, which brings undergraduate students to Mozambique each summer to complete an interdisciplinary service project with a local poultry business, was framed by my adviser as an ideal placement for my graduate coursework. It would, by this framing, seamlessly align with my desire to expand my experience with facilitating international travel opportunities for students and with my graduate program’s requirement that I complete a three-month public service project in an immersive, cross-cultural environment in which I could build on my first year of classes.

The operation that the undergraduate students in this program work with is described by the program as both a functioning business and an outreach and development project. Students are encouraged to “learn first-hand of the challenges in creating sustainable business in this inhospitable environment” (University of Arkansas, 2017). The university’s descriptions of the program focus on the way it helps local people with nutrition and jobs, while enabling visiting US students to learn how they can “lead” and “have a lasting impact.” Not found among the accounts generated by the university is the counter-story, readily accessible online, that the partner organization is complicit in taking land from local farmers to support large agribusiness interests, which provides a puzzling, at best, and problematic, at worst, contradiction of the university’s account of its work (National Farmers’ Union and GRAIN, 2015).

I chose not to partner with this study-abroad program. But the experience of learning about it reminded both Lesnick and me of what we had learned from our time in and continued engagement with Ghana. The harm that is too often done under the name of “service” not only affects local actors, but also obfuscates key issues. Many readers may be familiar with critiques of TFA and/or ISL work. However, few people are drawing comparisons between these two types of program—one situated in the Global North and the other in the Global South. Our hope is that, in naming some of the parallels between the two, we can shed light on the ways in which neo-liberal assumptions obscure the key issues and the agency of the communities they purport to serve.

Who are we?

We write as two white American women, both raised in upper-middle-class households by parents who had been to college and graduate school. We met when Bahn completed an undergraduate degree at the small liberal arts college where Lesnick teaches and directs the education program. We now consider ourselves colleagues, working both as educators (Bahn in a secondary and Lesnick a post-secondary setting) and academics (Bahn currently in graduate school and Lesnick a long-time faculty member).

We acknowledge the importance of situating ourselves and accept the responsibility of ongoing engagement with the unearned and destructive privileges that facilitate our lives. In calling our privilege as white, middle class, Americans/residents of the Global North destructive, we mean to emphasize the active hand of privilege in a world where its workings often result from, and in, theft and exploitation (of people, land, and resources); waste and the imposition of waste products; unequal access to quality education, health care, housing, and other determinants of survival; thriving cultural appropriation and erasure; and the creation of laws and policies that facilitate global economic inequality and mass incarceration, and mitigate the consequences for violence against people of color. Without ongoing work, these privileges will remain less obvious and less problematic to us (and to those like us) than they are to people (nearby and distant) on the receiving end of the destruction.

At the same time, in the work we do that informs this article, and in the article itself, we stretch for a wider sense of who we are and might be, where we come from, and where we go. We aim to trouble the ways of knowing and not knowing that give rise to some of the supposed remedies we critique here. While owning the limits of our connection to communities outside of our own, we affirm the complex ways in which communities differ and also overlap, elide, and exchange.

We read the Black Lives Matter platform’s call for community control in part, and rightly, as excluding us, and as asking us, as white people, to wait, to learn to listen, to stay, and to get others like us out of the way. We avoid calling ourselves white allies or comrades, not because we disavow those forms of relation, but because we feel they are not ours to name—and because we suspect that they may sometimes be reductive of the subjectivities involved. At the same time, we hear in the call of Black Lives Matter—with its interlocking focus on direct, democratic control of law enforcement agencies at local, state, and federal levels; an end to the privatization of education; and participatory budgeting at local, state, and federal levels—a mode of critique that is also a path of transformation. We are dedicated to learning from these teachings, and to integrating these learnings into our work as educators and writers.

From “the personal is political” to “the political is private”

In his 1981 book The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order, Joseph R Gusfield argues that public problems are “owned” by particular groups of people who have the power to define the problem (i.e. what it is, how it is situated within society, what its underlying causes are, etc.) and thereby inform the interventions implemented in response. Gusfield (1981: 10) writes that this concept of ownership is derived from the “recognition that in the areas of public opinion and debate all groups do not have equal power, influence, and authority to define the reality of the problem.” Rather, groups with institutional power are able to “define the situation, determine needs, and import value to whatever assets (knowledge, skills, resources) [they] bring to the table” (Keith, 2015: 15). Thus, while public problems can be made sense of in multiple ways, the public will not know of or will not consider these alternatives if the dominant group manages to control its definition effectively enough. The result: the ways in which people respond to the problem—the realm of possibilities that they view as accessible or acceptable to use in addressing it—are shaped and most often narrowed by the way that the problem is itself defined.

Today, private corporations and their political allies have gained ownership over two public problems: the educational “opportunity gap” in the USA and “underdevelopment” in the Global South. Our use of quotation marks for these terms here and in the opening paragraph of this article is meant to signal the constructed character of these designations as problems. Under their ownership, both have been defined as technical problems in need of private, market-based solutions. Choice, partnerships between state, corporate, and civil society actors, and “forms of individual and corporate citizenship that emphasize autonomy of the individual and voluntarism and charity in the market” are cast as not just the ideal but the only logical solution to such problems (Baillie Smith and Laurie, 2011: 547).

But these definitions obscure the political, legal, sociocultural, and structural contexts in which these “public problems” operate; in doing so, they shift the public’s gaze away from the role of the state and structural inequities perpetuated by dominant groups towards the actions of individuals (Bahn, 2014; Keith, 2005; Petras, 1997). Defining these public problems—the ones that TFA and ISL programs aim to address—as issues of individual knowledge and action rather than structural change is a highly effective discourse, in that it renders knowledge of its own character and limitations hard to reach and hard to recognize as significant. This narrative privatizes knowledge of itself.

In a neo-liberal world characterized by a love of measurable, quick-to-be-seen solutions, it is difficult to imagine alternative definitions of these public problems that more readily grapple with the complexity of the challenges, as the ensuing solutions would be viewed as too complex, too costly, and too risky to fund and carry out. This perceived lack of alternatives is directly a product of a powerful and pervasive discourse about underdevelopment in both domestic and international contexts. As Gee (1989) explains, a discourse works by commanding compliance with its terms; to stretch too far from those terms threatens to render the move of critique irrelevant or crazy. Both TFA and many ISL programs draw on this dominant discourse to make sense of their work. The result: they emphasize their impacts (often couched in market terms like profitability, leadership, and growth) while failing to grapple with, let alone acknowledge, the far more complex elements of the problems they aim to address and the potential drawbacks in their approaches to these problems.

For example, many ISL programs tout the benefits of their students’ work without grappling with the potential harms caused, and the key issues and community voices ignored in the process (Hartman, 2016). This is manifest in a quote from the public university that I (Bahn) was counseled to partner with for my international project, where it describes the work of its students in a summer service-learning program in Mozambique:

The operation has created several hundred jobs, has purchased feed from over 40,000 individual farmers and generates affordable protein that is severely lacking in the local diet. As such, the operation is both a functioning business and an outreach and development project. (University of Arkansas, 2017)

In a clear parallel, TFA paints the students it purports to serve only in terms of their poverty, all the while emphasizing corps members’ positive influence on their reading and mathematics scores as compared to those elicited by other teachers (Bahn, 2014). But, as with many ISL programs, this narrative paints a single story (Adichie, 2009) of the organization’s work, failing to grapple with the complexity of the problem—the “opportunity gap”—itself, and the mixed impacts of its corps members. For instance, while TFA writes on its website that its corps members dramatically improve student learning outcomes (Teach for America, 2017), numerous studies have found that TFA corps members only perform better in contrast to comparably undercertified teachers (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005; Heilig and Jez, 2010). Like the study-abroad program in Mozambique, the organization also does not acknowledge that it has laid claim to land—literally in the case of public schools now turned over to privately funded charter chains often designed as investments by individuals and corporations (Fabricant and Fine, 2013; Ravitch, 2010)—or that it has extracted money from the public sector by shifting pay from teachers and other personnel in traditional school districts, and shifting per-pupil dollars out of public schools (Fabricant and Fine, 2013; Ravitch, 2010).

Centering damage

In order to justify their approaches to the “public problems” they aim to address, which are most often top-down and technical in nature rather than engaged in complex, systemic, and justice-oriented change, both TFA and many (though not all) ISL programs paint the communities they purport to serve as desperate. They overvalue their own assets while devaluing the assets of the communities they purport to serve. For example, the US students who had participated in the Mozambique program emphasized their impact in the community while describing the local diet as “severely lacking,” and prospective TFA corps members touted their own leadership credentials while assuming that their students would be different from the “average student” and eager to “escape” their local communities (Bahn, 2014). These deficit orientations are promoted to position the work of these organizations as benevolent—or at least as neutral and inevitable.

Specifically, in framing the communities they purport to serve in broken terms, both organizations emphasize the urgency of need and, in doing so, justify the haste of providing service and the brevity of preparation to do so: one week to, at most, a few months in the case of ISL programs, and five weeks in a TFA summer training program. TFA uses this narrative of desperation to undermine the idea that it takes study, practice, mentorship, and personal growth to become a capable teacher. In the name of efficient service delivery, many service learning programs similarly sideline critical consciousness of the power involved in their work, and in particular in the motivations and impacts of their partner organization. In both cases, those “served” are assumed to be too needy to be anything but grateful, all while the actual impacts of the work are neither challenged nor reshaped.

In promoting deficit orientations to the communities they purport to serve, TFA and ISL programs frame their work as both neutral and inevitable. As Keith (2005: 15) explains, these organizations benefit from a privileging process that allows them to conflate their social superiority (on the basis of race, class, etc.) with moral superiority. Given this conflation between social and moral superiority and the necessity of their being perceived as morally sound by other powerful institutions such as funders and political supporters, these organizations emphasize their own participants’ merits while painting the communities they work with as broken.

When one entity has the power to define the situation, needs, and appropriate approaches to such needs, the imbalance allows those at “the top”—those ascribed social superiority on the basis of privilege—not only to define their own moral superiority, but also to make any opposition to or questioning of this superiority (and ensuing actions) appear misinformed at best, and ridiculous at worst. This, in turn, inhibits debate over how the public problem has been defined in the first place. For example, when Lesnick protested against the prominent access given to TFA to recruit students on her two campuses, she was told by the career centers that the colleges had to remain neutral. Similarly, Bahn’s adviser encouraged her to turn her gaze towards the points of “seamless integration” between her own interests, those of her university, and the ISL program, rather than question the potential harms and points of contradiction in the public university’s program.

The lack of conflict in these contexts, broadly speaking, may

hide the very features of the structure which make for their absence, which prevent the opposite forms of consciousness from being observed … Acceptance of factual reality often hides the conflicts and alternative potentialities possible. Ignoring the multiplicity of realities hides the political choice that has taken place. (Gusfield, 1981: 13)

Rethinking reciprocity

Many ISL and alternative teacher certification programs, such as TFA, exemplify neo-liberal ideas of individual autonomy and responsibility, while at the same time allying themselves to notions of collective global citizenship, solidarity, development, and activism (Baillie Smith and Laurie, 2011). In these ways, such programs market themselves as social-justice-oriented organizations, while continuing to fall back on an actual philosophy of volunteering-as-citizenship that teaches young people to “‘do good’ in the world as it is, rather than recreate the world as it could be” (Hartman, 2016).

This tension between individualism and solidarity is best exemplified in the notion of reciprocity, a common concept in ISL circles today, whereby Global North ISL participants complete service projects in exchange for the personal learning and growth that they receive through their travels to and interactions with individuals in a faraway land. While both TFA and ISL programs market their impact on other communities, the reciprocity framework was born from the recognition that ISL programs often benefit the student participants far more than the communities they purport to serve. The premise of reciprocity, then, is that if each party benefits in equal, though different, ways, the relationship is ethical. But this move towards reciprocity, while seemingly better than a charity or savior-mentality approach to such partnerships, is still deeply rooted in neo-liberal ideas of individualism and personal responsibility. As a result, it fails to fully grasp and grapple with the complexities of such work. Moreover, it still misses the key question: Who gets to define the terms of the exchange?

The discourse of reciprocity, like the broader narratives spun by TFA and ISL programs, casts both groups’ work as neat, tidy, and positive. ISL student participants and TFA corps members serve their target population and benefit (often with a line on their résumé) in return. But the framework of reciprocity perpetuates capitalist mindsets of always needing more. It is rooted in a giving–receiving dichotomy: “Reciprocity and its related concepts remain rooted in a (market) accumulation process, which presses people into giving and receiving and ultimately creating social networks as a way of having more” (Keith, 2005: 15)—including more knowledge. Reciprocity, as currently conceived, falls short because it only addresses one part of our selves—the rational, instrumental, and calculable part—when, in fact, such partnerships actually require a much deeper form of interconnectedness and interdependence (Keith, 2005). The relationships are rooted in neo-liberal frameworks of exchange, rather than solidarity.

Indeed, the origin of the term “reciprocity” is in relations among states or nations, not simply individuals or self-constituting groups: “the relation or policy in commercial dealings between countries by which corresponding advantages or privileges are granted by each country to the citizens of the other” (Reciprocity, n.d.). Here, too, the operation of structural, political relationships is easily submerged by the individualism of neo-liberalism. As Petras (1997) has argued, this has guided policy support for non-governmental organizations in order to keep the focus away from political struggle. At this time, notions of reciprocity are still defined by those in the dominant group. They get to define the terms of engagement and to set the narrative for how this engagement is presented to the outside world.

“Just speak nearby”

In the words of anthropologist and film-maker Minh-ha Trinh (1982): “Scarcely 20 years were enough to make two billion people define themselves as underdeveloped … First, create need; then ‘help.’”

One summer, at the start of my visit, I (Lesnick) was met at the airport in Tamale by colleagues, together with one of the summer fellows from the University for Development Studies. Following his work in the school, he had slept over in the community the night before, and came to greet me. As I joined him in the back seat of the taxi, he introduced himself, and then asked: “So, Prof, how is Ghana’s development coming on?” I was uneasy, but the last thing I wanted was to treat the student to a pompous lecture about conceptions of development, or to discourage or insult him in any way. I cannot remember exactly what I said, but I remember wanting it to be respectful, hopeful, and brief.

More recently, I (Lesnick) experienced similar uneasiness during a meeting with a student nearing graduation from the institution where I teach. She had just accepted a position to work as a TFA corps member after graduation. She explained that she remembered our discussion of some problems with TFA in the education course she took with me a couple of years before, but not what the problems were. Yet she did not ask me what the problems are. She did not actually seem to have anything to talk about with me, and I was not sure what to say. I congratulated her on the position and mentioned that I could send along an interesting article that a teacher in Philadelphia had given one of my classes to read, about the dispossession of public schools and disinvestment in their communities. I am a professor of Education, but I am also middle-aged and employed full-time by a private college with a large endowment. My student, a young woman of color, is starting her career, her livelihood, and knows enough to know that in taking the position she might have kept it from someone less aware of issues of racism and elitism. I ended up feeling mostly sorry that this ineffective encounter had taken nearly an hour in an already packed week.

Speaking also as a foreigner in a West African country—in this case, as a Vietnamese academic and film-maker employed by a US university and working in Senegal—Minh-ha Trinh (1982) challenges the traditional approach of the ethnographer: “I do not intend to speak about. Just speak nearby.” Minh-ha Trinh’s 40-minute film Reassemblage, from which these words come, is an exemplar of a line of work which disrupts the neo-liberal justifications of power that we have been tracking here. To speak about a group of people, we put a border around them, and refer to them with others, outside of themselves, as the audience. To “speak about” is one way of knowing and comes, like every way of knowing, from a way of living (Palmer, 1987). TFA speaks about the students it purports to serve by citing data about them “in an almost fast food-like fashion” (Veltri, 2010: 185), capitalizing on their demographics to attract funds, corps members, and public support. Many universities similarly otherize the community they claim to serve in their marketing materials to students, in which schools sell traveling to one of the world’s “most poverty-stricken regions” to help a community “facing extreme conditions” (University of Arkansas, 2017).

To speak nearby, in contrast, is a way of proximity, susceptibility, and possible accountability—subject to some of the same conditions, accessible to some of the same situations. I (Lesnick) sat near the student in the taxi, wanting to speak that way, but he invited me to speak about his country from the vantage point of a foreigner—American, white, a professor with enough money to arrive on a plane. What does it mean to “speak nearby” when all these categories of privilege are taken into account—so privileged that can one even be said to come “nearby”? Here, we circle back to what it means to write this way and do this work as white American academics/educators in a structural context of white supremacy understood as foundational to civil society in the USA and in other post-colonial settings (Coates, 2015). For us to respect the call for community control by the Black Lives Matter platform means we must ask these questions perennially, rather than adopt a specific set of answers. On a program level, to respect the call for community control similarly requires that programs such as those we describe here be organized to support questioning, critique, and multiple stories. They must be alert to the relentless rationalism of neo-liberal approaches, nested as it is in systems of structural oppression hostile to community control.

When speaking or designing programs nearby, we have the possibility to bring what Tuck describes as a desire-based framework. As she writes, desire-based frameworks are “concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (Tuck, 2009: 416). Tuck frames this desiring-to-know as an alternative to the damage-centered frameworks commonly employed by researchers and organizations like TFA and many ISL programs, as we have explored in this article. Desire-based frameworks assume the importance of unlearning and not knowing, together with what Tuck calls regard for the “not anymore” and the “not yet” (417). In this, there is something to learn from proximity, but it may not be what is expected and it may not correspond to assumptions about problems or progress. With this acknowledgement of not knowing, Tuck’s framework aligns with Minh-ha Trinh’s notion of “speaking nearby” because it suggests a way of speaking that grows out of the complexity and liveliness of experience, not the formulations that support speaking about others.

Perhaps, too, there is something in this notion of nearby—of putting seemingly separate things nearby one another—that is a possible method for disrupting the neo-liberal discourses of leadership we sketch out here. In this article, we put TFA nearby the global service learning movement and, in doing so, seek to tease out some of the intricacies of the work of each. Putting them nearby one another helps make aspects of each more visible. As we wrote earlier, so much of the work we see today is striving for clarity and directness, so much so that the nature of the work can be hidden from view. Powerful discourses can privatize knowledge of themselves, rendering them impossible to see clearly. Putting disparate programs, thoughts, and actions nearby one another can help shift this.

In writing this article, we started (and in some ways have remained) in a position of opposition to the programs about which we have written. Our own experiences and positionings caused us to confront TFA’s and many ISL programs’ narratives of themselves with an alternative conception of their work. We met their touted success with evidence of their harm. We opposed their technical conceptions of the “problems” they sought to address with our own understandings of the topics at hand, which were embedded in complex structures and systems but did not necessarily make space for any parts or pieces of their definitions. We spoke about, not nearby. And in the stories of our experiences that we shared, when we found ourselves nearby—Lesnick with her former student accepting a job with TFA, Bahn with her academic adviser recommending the problematic ISL program—we did not speak out. But, in this current political climate, we were humbled by feedback on a draft of the article from a colleague of Lesnick, someone who called into question our insistence on the truth of our arguments. We had met one narrative, one single story (Adichie, 2009), she said, with another, rather than expanding space for more altogether. She called us to move away from our own truths towards a place of complexity, competing truths, and contradictions.

And we are inclined to listen to her—with one qualification. In thinking through the process of comparing disparate programs and what our takeaway can be beyond fighting to replace one set of assumptions with another, and in writing from the positions of privilege we hold, we want to suggest the importance of assigning different weights to different truths such that those upheld by people oppressed rather than privileged by a system weigh more.