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

Originating as counter normative pedagogies, both service-learning and critical pedagogies hold a common commitment to subvert and transform facets of school life that may alienate and oppress students. This article explores how critical pedagogies and service-learning might provide complementary benefits and become a more compelling emancipatory pedagogy of 'critical service-learning' for K-12 educational contexts. This work proposes that these pedagogies of civic literacy and critical literacy can break their boundaries to intersect and provide a form of education for those students most marginalized and alienated by oppressive features of traditional instruction.