Toward a Critical Service-Learning Pedagogy: A Freirean Approach to Civic Literacy

Abstract This paper argues for an integration of Freirean and service learning: The questions raised by can supply a theoretical orientation for students to bring to their service learning experience. At same time service learning provides a practical correlative to hyper-theoretical discourse of pedagogy. I explore practical implications of this critical service learning pedagogy through my first-year writing theme course Citizenship and Public Ethics. Introduction In their respective ways, both and service-learning have redefined activist role that teachers, students, and educational institutions must play in articulating and confronting social problems. However, with exception of a few recent attempts to examine their complementary benefits,(1) there has been little sustained dialogue between these two educational theories. The following argument for a critical service-learning pedagogy is intended as a contribution to these emerging efforts to combine service-learning and pedagogies, a call for more integrated theory and practice, and a prescription of practical protocols. The questions raised by can supply theoretical preparation--indeed a sort of teacher training--with which students might approach service-learning experience. Reciprocally, so can service-learning, as practice of democratic ethics, function as an example of in action--thereby offering a practical correlative to what often remains an exclusively theoretical, hyper-academic discourse. Theoretical Foundations What has come to be known as pedagogy, radical pedagogy, postmodern pedagogy, border pedagogy, empowering education, popular education, and democratic education has multiple histories, ranging from European Enlightenment and German Frankfurt School to John Dewey's pioneering efforts to reform education in twentieth-century North America. Another history begins in South America with work of Paulo Freire. As early as 1950's, Freire had begun to introduce a new of teaching literacy to Brazilian peasantry. Writing in exile after military coup of 1964, Freire attacked banking method of education, whereby all-knowing teacher makes deposits of knowledge into empty heads of students, and proposed as an alternative method. In form of a dialogue, culture circle proceeds by posing problems, utilizing students' experiences as a legitimate form of knowledge, and developing a language of critique from those experiences. Ideally Freire's politicized would awaken in people a consciousness, or conscientizaco. Loosely translated from Portuguese, Donaldo Macedo defines conscientization as the process in which men, not as recipients but as knowing subjects, achieve a deepening awareness both of sociocultural that shapes their lives and of their capacity to transform that reality (Freire, 1985: 93). To engage student in this process of conscientization, Freire elaborated a literacy consisting of three stages: investigation, in which teacher gets to know local community and discovers its vocabulary universe of important words and generative themes; thematization, which explores and contextualizes these generative themes, breaking words down into phonetic groups for reading and writing; and problematization, which re-presents themes as a political problem that demands collective action. These methods offered a new view of literacy as reading not only word but world. Working with a host of North American collaborators ranging from Ivan Illich and Myles Horton to Ira Shor, Peter McLaren, and Henry Giroux, Freire continued to develop this critical pedagogy until his death in 1997. Although a clamoring and diverse group, pedagogues in United States have generally extended Freire's work into new domains of North American context. …