From Critical to Decolonizing Service-Learning: Limits and Possibilities to Social Justice-based Approaches to Community Service Learning

Abstract

Diverging from the traditional approach to servicelearning, critical servicelearning focuses on the root causes of inequality by addressing power and oppression. By incorporating critical pedagogy in the classroom, and action and reflection outside of it, critical servicelearning looks to find solutions to social issues through university— community partnerships. In this article, I review relevant literature that centers social justice– based approaches to critical servicelearning and argue that while these approaches are vital to student understanding of oppression, an anticolonial framework is needed to broaden notions of critical servicelearning that challenge settler colonial logics. This article engages with the question “Can we decolonize critical servicelearning?” and concludes by offering practices, such as solidarity to counter coloniality in higher education, that are responsible to the communities involved in the servicelearning partnership.