Ramapo College’s nearly eight-year-old Student Literacy Corps (SLC) exemplifies the college’s commitment to infusing the curriculum and student life with the principles and practices of civic engagement. The SLC, an academic course, transcends traditional disciplinary pedagogical approaches by offering students a theoretical and practical framework for learning about and tackling the issue of illiteracy in contemporary society. In partnership with St. Paul’s Community Development Corporation (an Americorps grantee), and two public schools in the historic city of Paterson, New Jersey, the SLC has worked consistently through the years to refine its methods and to undergird the program with the principles of popular education as developed by the great Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire. Popular education, like service-learning at its best, calls students, community members, faculty, practitioners — all constituents — into dynamic patterns of relationality in the effort to advocate for positive social change and just relations, especially among the historically disenfranchised.

In their emphasis on more than mere skills acquisition, SLC tutors develop reciprocal learning/teaching partnerships with learners in order to focus on the learners’ own goals, and more broadly, on community-building and empowerment. In its nearly decade-long history, Ramapo College Student Literacy Corps tutors have joined with learners in creating booklets of their original writings and drawings, in redressing problems with the withholding of wages and in becoming more actively involved in their children’s education. This type of community involvement, of service-learning practice, strengthens and nurtures habits of democratic participation among students, community members and faculty. As students prepare for lives beyond the academy, as community members work toward making their lives more livable, and as faculty learn to teach beyond their finite disciplines, each constituent group becomes more practiced in living lives of public participation for the promotion of the common good.

Student Literacy Corps web site: http://www.ramapo.edu/studentlife/cahill/stud_literacy.shtml