Human-Centered Community Engagement in Online Education: Developing a Critical Online Service-Learning Pedagogy

With continued growth in online education, higher education institutions have moved community engagement further into virtual spaces through e-service learning courses (Faulconer, 2020). These courses have a history of being client-based, rather than critical or transformational (Strait & Nordyke, 2015). I argue that this conception of e-service learning stems from an entrenched neoliberalism in online education and service-learning pedagogies. In response, this paper proposes a humanity-centered, anti-neoliberal pedagogical framework for e-service learning. Through a critical theoretical methodology of sociological imagination (Kelly et al., 2021), I argue for a critical online service-learning (COSL) pedagogy that expands opportunities for access, equity, and solidarity through humanity-centered methods of instruction in the midst of higher education’s neoliberal turn. The COSL framework relies on three converging nexuses (student-community, global-local, and individual-structural) that reframe seeming limitations of e-service learning into critical advantages for deepening student learning and advancing community goals all through a fully online experience.