Service Learning as Critical Pedagogy: Implications for Student Community Awareness and Citizenship Development

Abstract

As an innovative learning approach, service-learning possesses the potential to enhance community awareness of students and their citizenship growth. Through community awareness students understand their roles and responsibility as active citizens. Research has discovered that as critical pedagogy service-learning still lacks the ability to claim for developing real community awareness among students. This paper had two aims: first to evaluate the claim of service-learning on students’ community awareness development and second, to assess the ability of service-learning to promote students’ citizenship development. For this purpose, this paper investigated into the current literature on how service-learning provides real community based learning opportunities to the students in order to achieve these goals. Exploration of the existing literature revealed that despite of being termed as a time-consuming and expensive practice, service-learning has the potential to develop citizenship propensities of students as well as creation of community awareness. The review revealed that service-learning achieves these two goals on the basis of its characteristic of reciprocity. The paper concludes that as a critical pedagogy service-learning plays an important role in developing students’ community awareness and citizenship development.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2p471