Service and Scholarship

Service and Scholarship
Authors' view
In her paper Service and Scholarship, Raquel Farmer-Hilton argues about the deficit discourse about intelligence, race, and academic achievement. She analyzes how social mobility has for many years plagued academic scholarship and how the misplaced blaming of the victim, which the society has fixated on the academic field, has hindered academia from providing informed research and analysis on the inequality in academic scholarships in the United States. The current research on academia in the United States lacks cultural sensitivity to stimulate cultural knowledge in other researchers and general readers (Farmer-Hinton, 2011). Additionally, she highlights the challenges of the services scholarship approach through a series of reflections and chosen case studies from her personal experience.
First, Raquel discusses service and how education debt can be paid down. In her thoughts, she felt that research and policymaking had ignored the cumulative nature of academic debts, social justice, and equal school funding by echoing a speech made by Ladson Billings. In her quest to highlight the disparities in the education sector, she addresses how the sector can be connected through service and learning from doing. Raquel champions equality and narrates that students of color and those from economically deprived regions should not be disadvantaged in applying for educational scholarships. Additionally, she explains how a well-planned and equitable service scholarship can help address the cumulative nature of the education debt in the United States.
On the other hand, Jun Hong, Voisin, and Lee researched to examine school safety; the research highlighted the youth's and parents' perceptions of school safety and the multiple factors related to school safety. The research was narrowed down to only urban African American youth and their parents and low-income society. From the research, it was evident that females were most likely to perceive schools as unsafe. Additionally, the research analysis was viewed from a family level, school level, and community level (Hong et al., 2018). Neighborhood and communities that the students came from contributed to the student's and their parent's perception of school safety. A positive relationship between the teachers and the students also increased the perception of schools being a safe environment. The entire research stressed the benefits of a positive relationship between the students, parents, and teachers.
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