Keyword EssayCritical Service Learning William Carney Service learning has become a feature in higher education in courses ranging from computer science and graphic design to English and the humanities. These courses are designed to provide “internship” experience and enable students to use skills they learned in the classroom in “real world settings.” These “real world settings,” however, exist in some rather well-defined economic, social, and political system. Tania Mitchell suggests that traditional approaches to service learning either assume that such projects are already inherently related to social justice or are simply concerned with other issues such as the teaching of some rather acontextual “workplace skills.” There exists, however, a growing recognition that service learning could enable students to recognize and more deeply understand the social and economic structures they are asked to work within. The aims of this “critical service-learning” approach include the redistribution of power in the service-learning relationship, the development of authentic relationships between the university and community, and an unapologetic movement toward the goal of social change. At my university there is an interest in providing service learning in more traditional workplace settings, but there are also faculty members who are attempting to use these projects to help students understand the contexts in which they live and work. This keywords essay details some recent scholarship in literacy and critical service learning. It is by no means a complete picture of the efforts in this area but, rather, presents some interesting service-learning projects that might be duplicated at other institutions. All the projects provide opportunities for students to gain an understanding of the economic, social, political, and, in one case, environmental contexts in which they live. Writing plays a primary role in facilitating such understanding. Lisa Rabin’s article “The Culmore Bilingual ESL and Popular Education Project: Coming to Consciousness on Labor, Literacy, and Community,” details a service-learning project featured in a Spanish class at George Mason University. The project offered an alternative to more “market-based” service learning. In 2009, Rabin had been contacted by labor organizers from the Tenants and Workers United (TWU) in Culmore, Virginia to possibly have some of her bilingual students offer an ESL course for day laborers who were also new immigrants at the union’s offices. A former graduate student of Rabin’s was asked to spearhead the project and train the undergraduates who would serve as ESL teachers. The project attempted to build a bridge between academic literacy and community literacy using the “popular education” model (Calderon 2006). Rabin deemed the summer-long project a failure. She noted that the [End Page 79] clients of the program needed intensive Basic English instruction, a job that was much too large for full-time undergraduate students. The “separateness” between the two groups remained. The course, however, met a smaller goal, providing the opportunity for undergraduate students in a Spanish course to consider the role of structural forces in creating and sustaining inequity in Latino/a neighborhoods. Indeed, half of the undergraduate students were themselves “heritage” speakers of Spanish who grew up in bilingual households. Although Rabin was disappointed by what she considered the failure of the project to make positive changes in the lives of its clients, the undergraduate tutors seemed to come to a better understanding of the lives of immigrant day laborers. The sort of critical service-learning that students engaged in provided a more visceral understanding of the socioeconomic barriers at work in Hispanic neighborhoods. She suggests that service learning projects are too often hijacked by market entities that impose a neoliberal ideology on the very necessary work students perform. In Rabin’s project, students were able to form an attachment with the neighborhood where the clients lived and worked. This sort of service-learning project offers literacy services to clients while providing students a different lens through which to view their experiences. Similarly, in the journal Reading Improvement, Janet C. Richards explores how participation in a service-learning project might impact the professional dispositions of graduate education majors. Specifically, she wanted to know if participation in such a project would impact the majors’ attitudes toward and competence in teaching students of color...