This article focuses on how service learning can function as a democratizing and empowering approach to pedagogy, research, organizational learning, and community development. The dominant discourse of service learning has evolved into a narrowly-defined alternative pedagogy that promotes student learning and enrichment but very little community development, institutional change, and policy change. For service learning to lead to more meaningful social change, beyond pedagogical innovation, it must be reinvented as a more robust approach including pedagogy, research, organizational learning, and community development. We illustrate weak and robust forms of each of the previously mentioned dimensions with concrete examples from our service-learning work and in particular, from case study research comparing two global service-learning programs in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. We discuss challenges and implications for designing, implementing, and sustaining a more robust approach to service learning, beyond current pedagogical practice and toward social movement learning aimed at policy and institutional change.

Mode of access: Internet.