Service-Learning in Adapted Physical Activity: Using Relational Ethics to Guide Decision Making

Service-learning is used in kinesiology settings to provide benefits to underserved members of the community and experiential learning to university students. Adapted physical activity programs can influence university students’ attitudes toward disability, but there is evidence that miseducative experiences may occur during such programs, leading to stigmatization or parasitism of disabled people. Additionally, disabled people have shared mixed experiences within these programs. To disrupt the focus of such programs on the experiences of nondisabled stakeholders, we leverage relational ethics as a decision-making framework to include the voices of disabled people within these programs. Thus, our purpose in this paper is to make research-informed suggestions for the use of relational ethics to guide implementation of adapted physical activity service-learning programs and corresponding research. In building our case, we review adapted physical activity service-learning programs using a relational ethics lens to problematize available research and propose recommendations.