Chapter 10: Communities of Practice: Youth and Social Justice Service-Learning

In this chapter, the authors aim to expose a theory of learning operating within service-learning engagements among teachers, students, and community partners in order to discuss the ways a praxeological approach (Pascal & Bertram, 2012) to education can lead to important connections to larger life and civic goals. The authors of this chapter will use Lave and Wenger’s (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) communities of practice to conceptualize how social networks (i.e., civic and professional) become overlapping and interconnected with young people in schools through service-learning. In the spirit of Foucault’s (1977) “regimes of truth” (p. 133), the chapter explores the productive tension between communities of practice and the messy, fluid, dynamic nature of learning considering “service learning [as] a site of identity construction, destruction, and reconstruction with profound consequences of how we view the definitions and boundaries of the teaching process” (Butin, 2003, p. 1684). Emerging from this tension are implications for the research of and engagement in service-learning partnerships.