Service learning has become a feature in higher education in courses ranging from computer science and graphic design to English and the humanities. These courses are designed to provide "internship" experience and enable students to use skills they learned in the classroom in "real world settings. " These "real world settings, " however, exist in some rather well-defined economic, social, and political system. Tania Mitchell suggests that traditional approaches to service learning either assume that such projects are already inherently related to social justice or are simply concerned with other issues such as the teaching of some rather acontextual "workplace skills. " There exists, however, a growing recognition that service learning could enable students to recognize and more deeply understand the social and economic structures they are asked to work within. The aims of this "critical service-learning" approach include the redistribution of power in the service-learning relationship, the development of authentic relationships between the university and community, and an unapologetic movement toward the goal of social change. At my university there is an interest in providing service learning in more traditional workplace settings, but there are also faculty members who are attempting to use these projects to help students understand the contexts in which they live and work. This keywords essay details some recent scholarship in literacy and critical service learning. It is by no means a complete picture of the efforts in this area but, rather, presents some interesting service-learning projects that might be duplicated at other institutions. All the projects provide opportunities for students to gain an understanding of the economic, social, political, and, in one case, environmental contexts in which they live. Writing plays a primary role in facilitating such understanding. Lisa Rabin's article "The Culmore Bilingual ESL and Popular Education Project: Coming to Consciousness on Labor, Literacy, and Community, " details a servicelearning project featured in a Spanish class at George Mason University. The project offered an alternative to more "market-based" service learning. In 2009, Rabin had been contacted by labor organizers from the Tenants and Workers United (TWU) in Culmore, Virginia to possibly have some of her bilingual students offer an ESL course for day laborers who were also new immigrants

For those of us of a certain age, the term "adult literacy" conjures images of recently arrived immigrants participating in English-language literacy classes to find or to get ahead in their jobs or to take a citizenship exam. Similarly, we might think of those high school dropouts wanting that GED and taking "refresher" courses to make it happen. But as readers of this journal can attest, the world of adult literacy is far more extensive and far more variegated than anything that used to be associated with the term "adult literacy. " While some communities still offer basic English language courses to those who cannot speak English or for those who wish to gain a greater proficiency in reading or speaking the language, the notion of "literacy" has expanded along with ways that communities and other organizations have developed to encourage literacy. Even in this current economic crisis, a great variety of literacy programs are offered to a great variety of clients with very specific needs. In this synthesis, I seek to review some of the major trends in adult literacy and provide some basic information for the interested reader. I do not mean this essay to be exhaustive but to offer a review of some interesting recent research published in a variety of journals on different approaches to adult literacy. As such, I will explore programs in this country and innovative approaches throughout the world in English and other languages. The aspects of adult literacy that I will survey here include the psychological and social factors that participants in literacy programs bring to the tutoring experience, non-governmental agencies and literacy, concurrent and transnational literacies, technology, and literacy for specific purposes.