Service-Learning Literacies (Paperback)

Opposing the Discourse of "deficient youth," this book examines the literate lives of 11 urban adolescents engaged in an environmental service-learning club to understand how their personal literacy practices crossed over into their academic worlds. The students' voices provide teachers a view of how service-learning creates a Third Space, where personal and academic literacies work together to negotiate new knowledge, new Discourses, and new forms of literacy. Service-learning contexts represent some new sites of investigation for literacy educators. The Explorers club provides initial evidence that service-learning is a pedagogy that contains multiple factors that increase literacy engagement and may potentially reverse the trend of declining student motivation to engage with literacy practices, especially in middle school. If the challenge to increasing academic achievement begins with motivation, service-learning may serve as the catalyst to re-engage our students in learning.