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Hour after hour, box by box, and bag by bag, the team of students transferred the thousands of food items warehoused in a second-floor conference room at the Reicher Library on Arizona State University's West campus. Employing techniques they had developed over the six weeks of a campus-wide food drive, they formed a chain, tossing food back from the conference room to a waiting cart, then down an elevator, to a 16-foot rental truck waiting at the library loading dock. There, another student team, most sweating profusely in the 95 degrees of a spring day in Phoenix, rolled the items into the truck and stacked them. Ultimately, the truck would sag under the weight of tens of thousands of food items beginning the first leg of a journey to a community center that serves hot lunches to children in some of the poorest shantytown neighborhoods of Nogales, Mexico.
The load-out was one component of a project of place-bound but still crossborder service learning conducted in the context of a political theory course in transnational justice. Students supported the international food drive by soliciting donations around campus and in the community, and by sorting and counting the food each week as part of a campuswide competition among four colleges and the administration, as well as among student clubs. They also prepared presentation materials to educate those in other classes about the conditions in Nogales and other border cities that give rise to the need for assistance programs. Further, several service-track students took part in an experiential desert trip, on which they walked migrant trails, collected and categorized items left behind by unauthorized border crossers, and saw firsthand the arduous conditions endured by those attempting to escape grinding poverty in Mexico and farther south. They shared in class their photos and experiences from the trip.
All students in the course filled out pre- and post-surveys, including those who did not opt for the service track. Overall, service-track students reported the same kinds of gains in civic engagement and awareness of relevant issues as students taking part in study abroad programs that emphasize service learning at the overseas locale. Specifically, the Phoenix service-learning students reported becoming more aware of the needs of their community, more strongly believed that...