In this dissertation, I share the findings from a study I carried out during the 2006-2007 school year at Glennview High School, a Massachusetts public high school located in an affluent Boston suburb. This study involves 40 high school seniors randomly assigned to a fall semester course on social justice issues (entitled "Literature and Justice") and 43 high school seniors randomly assigned to serve as the control group. With a mixed-methods approach, I investigate the impact of learning about social justice on students' beliefs, attitudes, behaviors and worldview. What I found was that two types of students emerged from their exposure to social justice issues. A small minority of the Glennview seniors who participated in Literature and Justice experienced a deepening of their commitment to social action. Following Literature and Justice, these students expressed an intent to seek out community service opportunities in college and a desire to pursue socially responsible careers thereafter. However, a majority of the Glennview High seniors in Literature and Justice demonstrated a very different and unexpected shift in worldview; learning about social justice issues actually led them to describe a decreased commitment to addressing injustice. Through the aforementioned quantitative and qualitative data, I examine the shifts in worldview of these two sets of students and seek to explain how two groups of students can come away from the same learning experience with such divergent perspectives.

As a result of this examination, I offer two different developmental models to represent the Glennview students who participated in Literature and Justice: a "Fear, Futility and Resistance" model that represents the majority of Glennview seniors in Literature and Justice and a "Service-Work and Social Action" model that represents a small minority of the Literature and Justice participants. In this study's concluding chapter, I draw upon these two models to offer clear recommendations to educators, policy makers and researchers invested in deepening young people's commitment to service-work and social action.