Breaking literacy boundaries through critical service‐learning: education for the silenced and marginalized

A cascading mentoring pedagogy in a CS service learning course to broaden participation and perceptions

“…The effects of learning by teaching were also significant, increasing student interest in both teaching computer science and mentoring younger students and reinforcing student learning through teaching. Broadly speaking, our findings support the assertion that this sense of having been in the "same shoes" is an imperative in terms of developing future mentors out of the mentee role [14,15]. The mentor reflections of returning high school students suggests that those who engaged in the actual workshops (rather than just the undergraduate coursework) may very well have a claim to better understand how mentees feel and engage during such outreach.…”

“…Current discussions of service learning [14,15] stress the pedagogical importance of reciprocity to generate more authentic and longstanding relationships, and the cascading model we present here emphasizes the interchangeability of the mentormentee roles, grounding undergraduates' CS-knowledge in handson activity while also introducing underprivileged high school students to the academic and career potential of computing. Developed through a partnership between a university's computer science and education departments, the cascading model emphasizes not only CS-based content but also the modes of delivery for such content.…”

Becoming “Effective” Citizens? Change-Oriented Service in a Teacher Education Program

“…Servicelearning oriented toward charity, sometimes referred to as "philanthropic" service (Battistoni 1997), is an "exercise in altruism" and emphasizes "character building and a kind of compensatory justice where the well-off feel obligated to help the less advantaged" (p. 151). By contrast, justice-oriented service (Kahne and Westheimer 1996), critical community service (Rhoads 1997), revolutionary service (Reich 1994), and activism (Bickford and Reynolds 2002) help students to develop a deeper understanding of social issues and promote the development of skills necessary to work for social change (Boyle- Baise and Langford 2004;Donahue 2000;Hart 2006;Naples and Bojar 2002). A "do good" sense of responsiveness to immediate needs is replaced by an analysis of power and oppression (Wade et al 2001).…”

In the Service of Self-Determination: Teacher Education, Service-Learning, and Community Reorganizing

“…One lens can be found within critical pedagogy (Hart, 2006), which has Critical Service-Learning Initiatives historically advanced notions of building bridges between one's teaching within their classroom community, and the broader community's resistance to their dehumanization. A key tenet within critical pedagogy is not just periodically teaching in a local community context toward schooling benchmarks, but consistently embedding teaching with community members and spaces toward collective self-determination.…”