Toward a Critical Service-Learning Pedagogy: A Freirean Approach to Civic Literacy.

Abstract

This paper argues for an integration of Freirean critical pedagogy and service learning: The questions raised by critical pedagogy can supply a theoretical orientation for students to bring to their service learning experience. At the same time service learning provides a practical correlative to the hyper-theoretical discourse of critical pedagogy. I explore the practical implications of this "critical service learning pedagogy" through my first-year writing theme course "Citizenship and Public Ethics."

Introduction

In their respective ways, both critical pedagogy and service-learning have redefined the activist role that teachers, students, and educational institutions must play in articulating and confronting social problems. However, with the exception of a few recent attempts to examine their complementary benefits,(1) there has been little sustained dialogue between these two educational theories. The following argument for a "critical service-learning pedagogy" is intended as a contribution to these emerging efforts to combine service-learning and critical pedagogies, a call for more integrated theory and practice, and a prescription of practical protocols. The questions raised by critical pedagogy can supply the theoretical preparation--indeed a sort of teacher training--with which students might approach the service-learning experience. Reciprocally, so can service-learning, as the practice of democratic ethics, function as an example of critical pedagogy in action--thereby offering a practical correlative to what often remains an exclusively theoretical, hyper-academic discourse.

Theoretical Foundations

What has come to be known as critical pedagogy, radical pedagogy, postmodern pedagogy, border pedagogy, empowering education, popular education, and democratic education has multiple histories, ranging from the European Enlightenment and the German Frankfurt School to John Dewey's pioneering efforts to reform education in twentieth-century North America. Another history begins in South America with the work of Paulo Freire. As early as the 1950's, Freire had begun to introduce a new method of teaching literacy to the Brazilian peasantry. Writing in exile after the military coup of 1964, Freire attacked the "banking method" of education, whereby the all-knowing teacher makes "deposits" of knowledge into the empty heads of students, and proposed the "culture circle" as an alternative method. In the form of a "dialogue," the culture circle proceeds by posing problems, utilizing the students' experiences as a legitimate form of knowledge, and developing a language of critique from those experiences. Ideally Freire's politicized pedagogy would awaken in people a critical consciousness, or conscientizaco. Loosely translated from the Portuguese, Donaldo Macedo defines "conscientization" as "the process in which men, not as recipients but as knowing subjects, achieve a deepening awareness both of the sociocultural reality that shapes their lives and of their capacity to transform that reality" (Freire, 1985: 93). To engage the student in this process of conscientization, Freire elaborated a literacy method consisting of three stages: investigation, in which the teacher gets to know the local community and discovers its "vocabulary universe" of important words and generative themes; thematization, which explores and contextualizes these generative themes, breaking words down into phonetic groups for reading and writing; and problematization, which re-presents the themes as a political problem that demands collective action. These methods offered a new view of literacy as reading not only the word but the world.

Working with a host of North American collaborators ranging from Ivan Illich and Myles Horton to Ira Shor, Peter McLaren, and Henry Giroux, Freire continued to develop this "critical pedagogy" until his death in 1997. Although a clamoring and diverse group, critical pedagogues in the United States have generally extended Freire's work into the new domains of the North American context. In Issues and Trends in Critical Pedagogy, Barry Kanpol suggests that the various appropriations of Freirean pedagogy hold in common a general "movement to subvert and change areas of school life that are alienating and oppressive" (1997: 12). Gert J. J. Biesta (1998) synthesizes the competing strains of critical pedagogy in a recent issue of Educational Theory devoted to "The State of Critical Pedagogy Today":

   Although critical pedagogy has many faces and histories, the varieties of
   critical pedagogy in general agree in their emphasis on the political
   character of education. Critical pedagogies claim that education is not a
   natural, ahistorical phenomenon but that it should be understood in its
   sociohistorical and political context. Moreover, critical pedagogies are in
   one way or another committed to the imperative of transforming the larger
   social order in the interest of justice, equality, democracy, and human
   freedom (499).

Disturbed by the educational system's complicity in the reproduction of oppressive social conditions, critical pedagogy "chooses education as the primary means for social change" (503).

Quite another educational genealogy might be drawn up for what the academy refers to as service-learning, a cross-disciplinary program that structures academic curriculum around a community practicum, "rearticulat[ing] the college or university as part of rather than opposed to the local community" (Adler-Kassner, et al., 1997: 4). With roots extending from social programs and internship agencies to charity clubs, religious organizations, and mm-of-the-century agitations for a stronger federal government,(2) service-learning has gained notable popularity in many high schools, two-year colleges, and universities throughout the country. The 1990's marked a decisive decade in promoting the civic ideals of community service, witnessing the National and Community Service Act of 1990, the National Service Trust Act of 1993, as well as the proliferation of some 670 member institutions of Campus Compact since its founding in 1985. A Tufts alumnus recently donated $10 million to his alma mater to establish the University College of Citizenship and Public Service (Wilgoren, 2000).

Both critical pedagogy and service-learning locate themselves at the intersection between the academic and non-academic communities. Yet it could be generalized, if only for analytical purposes, that critical pedagogy provides a theory of radical politics, while service-learning offers a practice whose politics has been variously theorized--even contested.(3) If, as Bruce Herzberg (1997) worries, it is doubtful that "questions about social structures, ideologies, and social justice are automatically raised by community service" (59), some grounding in critical pedagogy can provide students with an ideological framework that encourages their analysis of social problems to move from individual or personal explanations to more systemic criteria.

If service-learning lacks a coherent theory or politics, critical pedagogy has been faulted for lacking examples of concrete practice.(4) Yet perhaps some practices akin to service-learning can be elicited from the new connections Freire and Giroux (1987) have forged between critical pedagogy and public imperatives. They advocate a "straggle to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political" by developing "a political discourse whose central thrust must be primarily understood as a pedagogical process" (xii). By broadening our notion of education to include "the production of subjectivities in public spheres outside of schooling," we can "develop a political and pedagogical discourse" that "extend[s] the imperatives of democracy in those public and private institutions that shape the quality of human life" (xiii). As an expanded political and pedagogical discourse, critical pedagogy must therefore extend to encompass "a variety of cultural spheres and, in doing so, open up areas of popular culture, mass media, trade union organizing, the family, and other public spheres to forms of educational and political analysis that render them accessible as occasions for pedagogical work" (xiv). If critical pedagogy can productively theorize such counter-institutional pedagogical and political spaces, service-learning offers a means for creating such spaces and for challenging young people to participate in these democratic efforts. In other words, service-learning, the practical complement to critical pedagogy, can work as the radical practice of extending the educational sphere.

A Freirean Approach to Civic Literacy

At the University of Minnesota, as at many colleges and universities, students must fulfill a "Citizenship and Public Ethics" general education requirement. First-year students can enroll in English Composition 1014: University Writing and Critical Reading, Emphasis on Citizenship and Public Ethics. According to the 1991 report of the Task Force on Liberal Education, courses with this emphasis "should discuss citizenship and public ethics in the abstract, and apply the abstract issues to concrete instances."

My version of EngC1014 combines the rich theoretical textures of critical pedagogy with the hands-on practical opportunities afforded by service-learning. The central tenet of critical pedagogy, namely, the connection between education and politics, serves as our starting point. Reading about Freire's critique of the "banking method" (Continuum, 1996), Bell Hooks' "engaged pedagogy" (Routledge, 1994), excerpts from Michael Apple and James Beane's Democratic Schools (ASCD, 1995), as well some of Jonathan Kozol's wake-up calls in Savage Inequalities (Crown 1991), students consider their own educational histories and experiences, as well as the larger social and institutional questions that shape their individual experiences. In our class discussions, we debate the "banking method" and a more participatory, "problem-posing" pedagogy. We ask questions about how curriculums and school systems might operate ideologically. We brainstorm solutions to the problems in East St. Louis.

While admitted challenges arise from the sophisticated language in some of these readings, students begin a process of conscientization that culminates in the transition from critical students to critical citizens. Linking the critical student and critical citizen in the Citizenship and Public Ethics course, I found that my students grew enthusiastic as they begin to consider, vocalize, and often discover their preferred teaching methods, learning styles, and classroom environments. Because it is unusual to spend class time calling education into question, students respond well to the ingenuity of the occasion and participate with excitement, perhaps finding it somewhat liberating to talk about school even as we are "doing school." Moreover, by developing a critical attitude towards their schooling, students increasingly take ownership of their education, moving from passive consumers to active producers of knowledge--a critical consciousness that they can bring to bear on their own emerging public identities as citizens in their community work.

As critical pedagogy "chooses education as the primary means for social change," the service-learning experience for EngC1014 continues the process of conscientization in more practical, situational contexts as students begin their service as literacy workers in community education centers. At the service sites, we experiment with Freire's three-tiered literacy method, beginning with investigative and thematic questions: Who are the people I'm working with? What are their backgrounds, frames of reference, personalities, needs, concerns? What is their relationship to literacy and language--in their native language and in English? Finally, where do I come from, and how will this influence the perspective I bring to my literacy work?

Freirean problematization consists in resisting individualistic and meritocratic criteria in favor of more systemic, politicized questions. Instead of dismissing social problems by saying "they are poor because they aren't motivated to find a secure job," critical pedagogy invites students to get at the roots of social problems by asking the harder questions: How and why does our society produce poor people? What are the connections between illiteracy, poverty, unemployment? Between race, class and gender oppression? Why are immigrants getting the shaft? Why are these kids having a rough time in school? These prompts can open up questions about welfare reform, social spending, immigration law, affirmative action, and hosts of related issues appropriate to the Citizenship and Public Ethics course.

Finally, problematization must result in questions of civic action: What are our public responsibilities as citizens? What should be the government's? What should we do? Engaging in this process, we develop trusting, invested, and reciprocal relationships with community clients, thus developing favorable conditions for "culture circles." Creating and participating in culture circles--a way to extend the educational space--through the process of investigation, thematization, and problematization, is the practice of a democratic ethics. Freirean conscientization encourages an activist, ethical citizen--someone who takes responsibility for the communal welfare; someone who, in Myles Horton's phrase, "wants for [other people] what you want for yourself" (1990: 177).

If we are committed to making the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical, teachers play an essential role in modeling, through pedagogical practice and political example, the democratic ethics that students are experimenting with at their community service sites. Moreover, in doing so, teachers also engage a central problematic of critical pedagogy, namely, the "teacher-student contradiction." A product of capitalist education, this dichotomy between the essentialized roles of the knowing teacher and the ignorant student characterized oppressive ideologies. Freire, rewriting the traditional boundaries between teacher and student, insisted that "Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction ... so that both are simultaneously teachers and students," that is, "teacher-students" and "student-teachers" (1996: 53, 61). Freire's dialogic, problem-posing approach, in which teachers entered into solidarity with students, served as "a mutual process for students and teachers to question existing knowledge, power and conditions" (Shor 1992: 33). While Freire's long-term revolutionary praxis calls for radical institutional change, the more immediate and more modest implications of becoming "teacher-students" here in North America consist in teachers demonstrating their mutual commitment to community service centers.

Just as students work at being teachers at their community service sites, service-learning can provide an opportunity for teachers to become, in a sense, students in their own classes. What this means for me in practice is that I also do what my students do: I fulfill my community hours at the sites I am affiliated with, often carpooling with students; I periodically visit the other sites; I conduct interviews for our oral history project; I keep my journal. Since I read my students' reflections on their community work in their journals, I feel obliged to share my own journal entries with them. According to the Community Involvement Program at the University of Minnesota, one of students' most frequent criticisms is that their instructors do not participate in the community work they assign. Reminding us to live our politics, Bell Hooks writes: "It always astounds me when progressive people act as though it is somehow a naive moral position to believe that our lives must be a living example of our politics" (1994: 48). So, too, can progressive educators lead by example, demonstrating not only a pedagogy in which teachers stand in solidarity with students, in which what's good for students is good for teachers, but also a participatory, community-oriented, publicly accountable way of being in the world--whether as a teacher, family member, neighbor, citizen, or any of a range of public identities--that is founded on the principles of a democratic ethics.

Moreover, students attracted to this nontraditional, anti-hierarchical classroom arrangement might reciprocate such egalitarian gestures in their own attempts to stand in solidarity with their community clients. One student, Yee, defined her civic identity in leadership terms:

   I'm not sure what the kids think of me. Sure they see me as a big person
   with some authority. But power is not the only aspect of leadership. In an
   effort to strengthen my leadership skills I've tried to do the things the
   kids do and not just exercise my privileges of being a grown-up to the
   kids. The kids aren't allowed to have ice in their drinks at snack time, so
   I don't either. They want to sit in chairs at the table during storytime
   but they have to sit on carpet squares on the floor. Instead of sitting
   high on a chair I join the kids.

Devin, working with a first-grader in an after-school program, wrote about applying what came to be called in our class "participatory education":

   She wanted me to make up some math problems for her to do on the
   chalkboard. She had a lot of fun with that but soon she wanted to give me
   problems. So I gave her the chalk and she started writing problems. I think
   this was a lot of fun for her because it gave her a chance to be the
   teacher. Kids really seem to enjoy it when they get to play the role of the
   teacher. This is probably a very important part of education because it
   gives them a chance to see a problem from both sides. Normally all you get
   to do in school is solve problems. But by allowing kids to teach they get
   to see how problems actually form and where the answer is really coming
   from. This could be an important part of participatory education.

In the ways that I and my students have voiced, this intersection of critical pedagogy and service-learning constitutes a democratic ethics in action, both in the classroom and the community, and demands that the structures of the classroom embody the very theories of citizenship and public ethics that serve as the course's content.

Finally, since this is a first-year writing course, writing is the centerpiece of our democratic endeavors to build a better, more caring society through community involvement. Early assignments are geared towards introspection and questions of identity formation that validate students' own experiences. We utilize our foundational readings in critical pedagogy to begin to thematize the identity that many undergraduates know best--being a student. Students begin by writing, revising, workshopping either a personal narrative about a formative educational experience or a proposal for educational reform.

Throughout the term, students also keep journals in which they begin by recording personal encounters and memorable moments in their community service. However, as the epistemological emphasis shifts from the individual to the collective and from the personal to the ideological, the assignments accordingly move from `writing the self' to `writing the community.' Journal entries increasingly focus on the mediation between self, others, and, most importantly, the larger social formations in which these actors perform. We begin our "historical literacy" unit by continuing our interrogation of the ideology of schooling that our critical pedagogy readings initiated. We read excerpts from Howard Zinn's The Twentieth Century: A People's History (HarperPerennial, 1998) and James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Simon and Schuster, 1996) that challenge any consensus history that students will have encountered through school, the media, and popular culture.

Following our ongoing debate between the banking method and a more participatory pedagogy, we attempt to do participatory social studies by writing oral histories. In this assignment students become local historians, returning to one of their own communities to interview friends, relatives, immigrants, public officials, war veterans, or civilians. The service-learning experience is particularly adaptable to this assignment, depending on the site's permission, clients' willingness, and students' interest, and many students used the opportunity to interview clients and build their relationships with them. As local historians, the historical literacy we gain emphasizes a view of history that is lived, real, personal, ongoing, and dynamic. As problem-posing education "takes people's historicity as [its] starting point," affirming people as active participants "in a process of becoming" (Freire 1996: 65), we encourage people and communities to speak (and speak out), providing forums for their voices, so that they can tell `theirstories,' `ourstories,' `herstories,' `histories.'

We carry this creative ethic to our final project, in which students showcase their writing skills to create something that the community site can actually use to promote its mission, galvanize support, and recruit volunteers. The project is designed according to the needs and desires of the community sites as well as the skills and preferences of the students. Students work with the sites to write pamphlets and brochures; create newsletters; write grant proposals; conduct interviews with site directors, staff and clients; and compile volunteer packets. Some students even create websites. If students began the term by telling their own stories about educational experiences, they conclude by creating spaces for other people--the directors, staff, clients, and even the community sites-to tell their stories.

In short, the more involved we become in our community outreach, the more engaged and public the writing assignments become until we are finally writing for real audiences and our writing clearly serves a broader social mission than getting a grade in freshman comp. In this way, our writing is dialogical, collaborative, and activist, serving as a key instrument through which we put into practice a democratic ethics of "doing with" the community, as Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2000) put it, rather than "doing for" or "doing to" the community. The community service experience helps students to take ownership of their own histories, experiences, and their emerging public identities as citizens (not to mention their writing skills) as they simultaneously create media for community residents, staff, and sites to explore their histories and experiences.

In these ways, a "critical service-learning pedagogy" works toward long-term alliances between academic and nonacademic communities. It encourages university people and community people to become "teacher-students," learning from each other in the dialogues of the culture circle. It challenges the student identity as a passive, ahistorical, individualistic consumer of knowledge and promotes the student as an active, historical, collective producer of knowledge. It combines the formidable theoretical apparatus of critical pedagogy with the practical fieldwork of service-learning so that theory informs practice, practice informs theory, and both hold each other in check. "Without practice there is no knowledge," said Freire (1990) in a conversation with Myles Horton. And so the words of another student, Amanda, who said that her community work

   ... allowed me to realize where my newly found knowledge would be applied
   and how it could be useful not only to myself, but to others as well....
   Learning the difference between participatory pedagogy and the banking
   method, discussing them in class, and writing a paper on them was just
   fine. But actually choosing to expand on that by going out into our
   community and implementing one of them made everything just make that much
   more sense.

Finally, a critical service-learning pedagogy creates opportunities for people, both in schools and communities, to read the world and to act in the world, thus strengthening their sense of public responsibility and moral agency, nourishing confidence in their ability to effect change in society.

Notes

(1) John Wallace (2000), writing about the Jane Addams School for Democracy, examines the potential of service learning to overcome what Paulo Freire termed "banking education." C. David Lisman gives some brief airtime to critical pedagogy before making the general recommendation: "Combining service-learning with critical pedagogy is an important step towards working for social transformation" (1998: 83). Elisebeth Hayes and Sondra Cuban (1997) borrow the metaphor of "border-crossing" from cultural studies theory and critical postmodern pedagogy in order to explore the boundaries of class and culture that often attend students' service-learning experiences and that demarcate the campus from the wider community. Norma Greco (1992) describes how a Freirean "critical literacy" informs her high school students' community service and alerts them to matters of institutionalized injustice, such as tracking.

(2) Keith Morton and John Saltmarsh (1997) argue that our current notions of community service arose "out of the collision of capitalism and democracy at the turn of the century" (137), generating three "paths" which they examine in terms of the work of Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, and John Dewey.

(3) See Kahne and Westheimer (May 1996) for an elucidation of the ideological perspectives that inform service-learning pedagogy.

(4) Cuban and Hayes (1997), for instance, culling from the work of Henry Giroux and Gloria Anzaldua, mention that "While we found these ideas [of border pedagogy] to be provocative, we found concrete descriptions of border crossing in the literature to be limited in number" (75). Some of these concrete descriptions might be found in Shor, ed., Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook 1987).

References

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Eric Daigre is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He does community education through the Phyllis Wheatley Community Center, and the .lane Addams School for Democracy. <[e-mail], [e-mail]>