Enacting Social Justice to teach Social Justice: the Pedagogy Of Bridge Builders

This article describes a particular endeavor, the Bridge Builders Academic Mentoring Program (BAMP), a partnership between a school of education in a Catholic university in the Northwest and a community-based rites of passage program for adolescent African American males. The partnership exemplifies tenets of Catholic social teaching, in that it is community-based, justice-oriented, and in many ways countercultural. The pedagogy aligns with the goals of service learning; that is, the service extended by university students satisfies a genuine community need, and at the same time affords those engaged in service an op-portunity to acquire crucial knowledge, skills, and dispositions to which they would not otherwise have access. Implications for translating this program to other contexts are provided