Toward a Civil Society: Civic Literacy and Service Learning

Addressing the need for marshalling the resources of education to help promote a more civil society, this book argues that education has a critical role to play in challenging the dominant views of politics and education. Service-learning, or academically-based community service is seen as a promising educational pedagogy that can help students acquire civic virtue and serve as a mechanism to enable institutions of higher education become stronger community partners. However, there is currently a lack of theoretical grounding for the service-learning movement; consequently service-learning is in danger of being co-opted by academic traditionalism, which could vitiate service-learning’s social transformative potential and in fact undermine efforts at democratic revitalization.