COMPOSING NEW IMAGINARIES WITHIN ENGLISH COMPOSITION: ENTERING BORDERLANDS WITHIN CRITICAL SERVICE LEARNING SPACES

Abstract

Despite over thirty years of service learning research, the vast majority of research in America conducted on service learning in higher education, both within composition courses and across other academic disciplines, focuses on college students attending four-year universities, with little attention given to their two-year counterparts (Kozeracki, 2000). And, more often than not, perhaps because these studies are conducted on four-year campuses, the students engaging in service learning within these studies are often depicted as homogenous, primarily White, middle and upper class students who are more privileged than the community partners with whom they engage in service and who are, therefore, “strangers” - breaking and entering into community spaces that are physically and culturally different from their own (Green, 2003; Himley, 2004; Mitchell, 2015; Bocci, 2015). However, community college classrooms are often much more socio-economically, racially, culturally, and ideologically diverse than what is found at the vast majority of four-year institutions, with many students existing in similar spaces of precarity as the community partners with whom they engage in service learning (Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, & Hernandez, 2017). Thus, this researcher-participant study utilizes narrative inquiry in order to share the lived experiences of two community college students and one juvenile detention center resident who participated in a critical service learning English Composition course within either an immigration detention center or a juvenile detention center. The results of this study provide counter narratives to common misperceptions about the identities of students and community partners existing in these spaces, and they also argue for further research to better nuance our understanding of each of these populations and the role that social justice literacy pedagogies can play in challenging deficit-oriented approaches to literacy instruction within these spaces.