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.