Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Designing Service-Learning To Enhance Social Justice Commitments: A Critical Reflection Tool, Michaela Stith, Treniyyah Anderson, Dane Emmerling, David Malone, Kathy Sikes, Patti Clayton, Robert Bringle

Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education

The COVID-19 pandemic—coupled with ongoing prominent injustice related to race, poverty, healthcare, and education—has highlighted the interlocking and reinforcing nature of systemic oppression. Now more than ever, facilitators of experiential learning are galvanized to explore and deepen their understanding of systemic change and to enhance their teaching of justice concepts, perspectives, and skills.

Advancing social justice was a part of the original vision for service-learning (Stanton et al., 1999). However, scholars have long identified the ways in which service-learning can perpetuate inequitable social hierarchies, be miseducative in teaching simplistic understandings of solutions to social problems, and not equip students to …