Chapter 13: Social Justice in Service-Learning and Community Engagement: A Conversation About Meanings, Practices, and Possibilities

“What are we doing?” This oft-repeated refrain started us down a path of inquiry related to social justice. The question is driven by frustration with the gaps between rhetoric and reality when it comes to justice, equity, and inclusion in our institutions, communities, and state and with the escalation of divisiveness and vitriol in public discourse. It expresses the reality that many of the issues the service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) movement was originally intended to help ameliorate (e.g., food insecurity, poverty, environmental degradation, access to quality education, and health care) persist and, indeed, are in some ways worsening.

Many of the early adopters came to SLCE with an explicit justice framework, though this organizing principle weakened as the movement shifted focus to academic legitimacy and institutionalization within higher education. Over the past decade, strong voices have advocated a reinvigoration of the social justice orientation of SLCE. Mitchell sounded this call in a 2008 article exploring “critical service learning,” which is “unapologetic in its aim to dismantle structures of injustice” (p. 50). Stoecker’s Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement (2016) criticizes current SLCE practices as “providingjust enough charity to maintain the victims of an unjust social system while doing nothing to change that system” (p. 58). In the 2017 retrospective Where’s the Wisdom in Service-Learning? early thought leaders in SLCE lament that the movement has “lost a bit of its edge” by moving away from early commitments to changing systems of oppression and marginalization (Stanton, 2017, p. 90).