Service-Learning Literacies (Paperback)

Opposing the Discourse of "deficient youth", this book examines the literate lives of 11 urban adolescents engaged in an environmental service-learning club to understand how their personal literacy prac-tices crossed over into their academic worlds. The students' voices provide teachers a view of how service-learning creates a Third Space, where personal and academic literacies work together to negotiate new knowledge, new Discourses, and new forms of literacy. Service-learning contexts represent some new sites of investigation for literacy educators. The Explorers club provides initial evidence that service-learning is a pedagogy that contains multiple factors that increase literacy engagement and may potentially reverse the trend of declining student motivation to engage with literacy practices, es-pecially in middle school. If the challenge to increasing academic achievement begins with motivation, service-learning may serve as the catalyst to re-engage our students in learning.