Difficult Stories: Service-Learning, Race, Class, and Whiteness.

Abstract

AL s service-learning scholarship enters its second generation, the writing on service-learningl must begin to reflect our own-and our institutions'complex relationship to "doing good." Since service-learning is a widely accepted part of many college curriculums, those who write about servicelearning must go beyond the pragmatics of when and how to integrate service into composition courses and begin to theorize who participates in servicelearning programs and why they do so. I hope, as Cynthia Rosenberger writes, that service-learning can create a "more just and humane society," and believe that in order to do this service-learning must "generate a thoughtful and critical consciousness in all stakeholders" (39). We must begin theorizing how service-learning is experienced differently by those from different groups and look closely at the gaps between our theories of service-learning and our theories of subject position(s), of race, class, gender, sexuality, and writing. Recent work