Paper presented at IARSLCE (International Association of Research into Service Learning & Community Engagement) Conference, Chicago, USA, Nov 4, 2011. Writing ourselves out west: Curriculum leakages, creative endeavours & pedagogical encounters Associate Professor Susanne Gannon, University of Western Sydney, Australia i This paper rereads a service learning / community engagement pedagogy for pre-service secondary teachers in western Sydney, Australia, as a ‘leaky’ curriculum that allows for slippages beyond conventional curriculum silos, and that provokes productive and unpredictable pedagogical encounters. The leaky or 'holey' curriculum is a concept I have borrowed from new approaches to curriculum theory inspired by the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze and his collaborator, Felix Guattari, were keen to provoke new ways of thinking and advocated the creation of concepts as the central role of philosophy. New concepts create new connections and in so doing, they actively create new worlds and new ways of thinking the world. In a recent book Jason Wallin turns to the etymology of curriculum – from the Latin 'currere' meaning 'to run'‐ and refigures currere as a concept that opens a new way of thinking about curriculum, that is, despite its lineage, more open to a future where teaching and learning are envisaged as creative rather than reproductive endeavours. In this paper, I consider the productive capacity of the more open ended curriculum of service learning to 'run', in the sense opened up by the concept of 'currere', and I consider how this might create 'new flows, offshoots and multiplicitous moments' (Wallin, 2010, p. 2). 'Currere' – as opposed to curriculum - implies 'a line of becoming that expands difference and implying experimentation, movement and creation' (Wallin, 2010, p. 2). However, etymologically,