Cultivating Care through Ambiguity: Lessons from a Service Learning Course

Given the focus of professional graduate ICT programs on technical and managerial skills, pedagogical engagement with external organizations tends to be transactional and artifact-centered. This inhibits the students' ability to understand social, technical and ethical issues in context, or to develop affective relationships with users and other stakeholders. To address this, we designed a service learning course that partnered students with non-profit organizations to help with their technology challenges. The service project was deliberately left open-ended to force students (and partners) to tackle important questions around project scoping and impact. By drawing parallels to soil care practices, we explore how "care time" emerged in this context, and how the incorporation of ambiguity galvanized students, community, and faculty to make time to navigate it. This led to non-tangible yet vital outcomes such as overcoming social limitations, building symbiotic relationships, and enacting acts of care necessary for more ethical orchestration of technology.