John Dewey and the Rebuilding of Urban Community: Engaging Undergraduates as Neighborhood Organizers

John Dewey's related concerns to revitalize education and to rebuild community and democracy at the local level have powerfully appealed to service-learning advocates. Yet only rarely have students been engaged directly as neighborhood organizers, a role that, from Dewey's perspective, would appear to have great educational and social promise. After exploring this anomaly, this paper employs Dewey's understanding of democracy to analyze one program which has succeeded in making widespread use of college students as front-line organizers. The complementarity between what students do in their neighborhood target sites and what happens within the classroom generates the extraordinary potential of this service-learning activity.