Herzberg

Herzberg, Bruce. "Community Service and Critical Teaching." Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Composition. Ed. Linda Adler-Kassner et al. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 1997. 57-69. (Rpt. CCC 1994)

Reports on project-based ASL at Bentley College and finds that "service learning generates a social conscience" (58)--but that oftentimes middle-class student response is personal and rooted in charity, as opposed to stemming from a contextual, activist, or justice-based approach to social change: "I don't believe that questions about social structures, ideology, and social justice are automatically raised by community service. From my own experience, I am quite sure they are not" (59). He finds that students recognize systemic injustice in texts (Mike Rose, Jonathan Kozol) more easily than in their own lived experiences at work sites, but that slowly, a deeper understanding of social structures became part of student repertoire. ASL can help universities be "radically democratic institutions, with the goal not only of making individual students more successful but also of making better citizens, citizens in the strongest sense of those who take responsibility for communal welfare. These efforts belong int he composition class because of the rhetorical as well as the practical nature of citizenship and social transformation" (66).