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One defining characteristic of service-learning as a pedagogical tool is its focus on reflection. Within service-learning programmes, students engage collaboratively with one another and community members, and are encouraged to reflect on the various aspects of their experience. The author argues that reflection is crucial for its contribution to service-learning, as a teaching methodology, and to service-learning’s cognitive, affective and social impact. Part of service-learning’s impact is its contribution to the development of inclusive attitudes and predispositions towards inclusiveness among school students and tertiary students, particularly pre-service teachers. The chapter recognises inclusivity as an element of quality teaching that helps students make connections with contexts outside the classroom, engage with different perspectives and ways of knowing and to accommodate all their peers and all those being offered service. The chapter recommends a particular approach to the expansion of thinking and practice that inclusivity requires, one based on the methodology of the Philosophy in Schools movement, which has its genesis in the work of John Dewey. That approach uses the mechanism of the Community of Inquiry to structure reflective activities in a way that facilitates the development of students’ critical and creative thinking and their capacity for substantive dialogue. Within the Community of Inquiry students are encouraged to engage with differing and perhaps novel perspectives as they respond to real-life service-learning experiences. Well-facilitated reflection gives students the opportunity to develop skills and dispositions conducive to deep understanding of concepts and issues that arise in discussion. It also helps to raise awareness of preconceptions and attitudes that can undermine inclusiveness in education. The chapter draws the conclusion that rigorous reflection serves as a stimulus to act to implement inclusive practices within service-learning projects on the basis of well-justified reasoning.

The literature on friendship reveals particular tensions within the notion of friendship; tensions such as that between the significance of similarity by comparison with difference within the relationship; or the tension between liking a friend for his traits and qualities and liking him uniquely. The work of Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship helps to elucidate the first of these tensions, beginning with an examination of the claim sometimes attributed to Aristotle: ‘O, my friends, there is no friend’ to argue that friendship as fraternity can become the schema that democracy adopts for the future. This paper explores and argues for the inter-relatedness of two questions about friendship in the context of politics: Can friendship act as a model for political community? And is friendship itself a political relationship? It argues that while both these questions can be answered in the affirmative, those answers create value by providing a guide that can support the development of our complex identities as mature individuals and citizens.

This chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach combining expertise in sports management and in philosophy to examine the premises underpinning the contested claim that professional athletes have a special obligation to be role models both within and beyond the sporting arena. Arguments for and against the claim are briefly addressed, as a prelude to identifying and elucidating a set of factors relevant to a consideration of this alleged special obligation. The chapter considers understandings of sport, play and athleticism from an ethical perspective and examines their relationship to professionalism to determine the extent to which ethical imperatives can logically be upheld or undermined within the professional context. The chapter concludes that professional athletes cannot be expected to be able to respond to the demand that they act as role models within and beyond the sporting arena unless the tensions implicit within that demand are articulated. The chapter calls for recognition of the complexity of ethical decision-making in the context of professional sport and recommends that the training of professional athletes should prepare them to deal with this complexity. Recognition of the complexity of decision-making with the professional sporting context suggests the need for further research into optimal training strategies for young professional athletes and into the genesis and reasonableness of the demand that such athletes act as role models both within and beyond the sporting arena.