Critical Service-Learning as a Vehicle for Change in Higher Education Courses

Abstract

Our story begins with us, two female faculty members of Color, meeting through a faculty fellowship program focused on service-learning.Through this program, we soon discovered that the work in which we were engaged could be categorized as Critical Service-Learning (CSL), which is similar to, but distinctive from service-learning.Service-learning is a "course-based, credit bearing educational experience" (Bringle & Clayton, 2012, p. 105) through which students in higher education develop a greater sense of civic responsibility while participating in acts that are mutually identified and organized to benefit the community.CSL is a response to traditional service-learning.Though structured similarly, it explicitly places social justice as central to the interactions between students and community members (Butin, 2015;Mitchell, 2008Mitchell, , 2014)).Further, practitioners of CSL deliberately integrate pedagogy centered on social justice frameworks used to raise critical consciousness in order to take purposeful action (praxis) against structural injustice or violence (Mitchell & Rost-Banik, 2016).This pedagogy is not discipline-specific.It can be developed to enhance ways in which students recognize their own implicit biases as they make sense of their discipline in relation to the individuals and community members they impact through their work.As faculty of Color who work primarily with undergraduate students who are white, middle-class, and monolingual English-speaking, we are particularly interested in troubling