What is Critical Service Learning

Colleges and universities in the U.S. engage in service-learning in order to cultivate dispositions of empathy and civic engagement. This chapter draws from a Foundations of Education course in a historically and predominately White institution participating in service-learning in predominately Black and Latinx high schools. The purpose of the course was to teach about the legacy of state sponsored oppression, social justice education, and advocacy. The course provided theoretical frameworks to the practical knowledge and skills that students garnered from engagement in community schools. Data collected for research purposes were quantitative and qualitative. The results of the study show that service-learning can be a vehicle toward social justice education particularly in exposing oppressive structures and practices in urban schools.