Service Learning for Youth Empowerment and Social Change

Contents: Jeff Claus/Curtis Ogden: Service Learning for Youth Empowerment and Social Change: An Introduction - Joan Schine: Beyond Test Scores and Standards: Service, Understanding, and Citizenship - Joseph Kahne/Joel Westheimer: In the Service of What? The Politics of Service Learning - Miranda Yates/James Youniss: Promoting Identity Development: Ten Ideas for School-Based Service Learning Programs - Jeff Claus/Curtis Ogden: An Empowering, Transformative Approache to Service - Alice L. Halsted: Taking a Calculated Risk: Harnessing the Exuberance of Youth through «Community Problem Solvers» - Tricia Bowers-Young/Richard D. Lakes: Wath's Love Got to Do With It? Teen Dancers on Community Service Learning - Joy DesMarais: Ripples of Empowerment: A Personal Reflection - Cynthia Parsons: Service Learning and the Making of Small «d» Democrats - Robert W. Maloy/Abbie Sheehan/Irene S. LaRoche/Richard J. Clark, Jr.: Building Legacies: School Improvement and Youth Activism in an Urban Teacher Education Partnership - Carol Kinsley: Empowering Teacher Education Students through Service Learning: A Case Study - Curtis Ogden: Going Beyond Service.

The Editors: Jeff Claus is Associate Professor at the Center for Teacher Education at Ithaca College. He has a B.A. and MSed. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in the Social Foundations of Education from Cornell University. He has published articles and chapters on the topics of service learning, youth employment programs, issues of diversity in teaching and teacher education, and critical theories of education. He has also taught high school English and has been Coordinator of community service programs with the Learning Web, a youth service organization in Ithaca, New York.
Curtis Ogden is currently a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School where he is pursuing studies in education, ethics, and social change. Prior to this, he was Coordinator of the ImPACT service learning program at the Learning Web in Ithaca, New York. He holds a B.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan, and has published articles on the topics of service learning, community development, and youth empowerment. He has also worked with youth in Boston, Massachusetts and in Harare, Zimbabwe.

«Bravo for Claus and Ogden, who offer us the right book at the right time. With service learning's growth, we educators need to ask how this kind of program develops critical thought about the system we live in. Service learning can encourage social inquiry and democratic activism to change the world we are serving. This book is a teacher's friend - to help us design empowering and transformative learning.» (Ira Shor, author of 'Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change' and 'Critical Teaching and Everyday Life')
«Today, when young people are either sentimentalized or demonized, we badly need precisely the sort of real and down-to-earth engagement with young people's democratic capacities, talents, and energies that are represented by the new work of Jeff Claus and Curtis Ogden in 'Service Learning for Youth Empowerment and Social Change'. This is a very serious, important book about a subject central to America's future: how youth can help rebuild our democracy.» (Harry Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and author of 'The Backyard Revolution' and 'Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work')
«Jeff Claus and Curtis Ogden have assembled here some of the most thoughtful and perceptive observers and practitioners, educators, and school reformers; together they construct a notion of service learning based on sustained engagement not beneficent tourism, solidarity more than service, and learning toward a democracy that is participatory not passive.
What we find are classrooms immersed in the practice of democracy; projects built of, by, and for the people; education that takes a stand for a more peaceful and a more just social order. 'Service Learning for Youth Empowerment and Social Change' can serve as antidote and inspiration, pointing to service learning as propulsive and life changing, an enterprise suited for schools as they could be, but are not yet. This is essential reading.» (Bill Ayers, author of