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Academic service-learning in teacher education.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This study examines the impact of service-learning on undergraduate students enrolled in Social Foundations of Education at a private liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic region. Findings suggest that students developed a more meaningful understanding of course themes as a result of their community experiences particularly with regard to teacher roles, student diversity, and self-assessment. The implications of service-learning for the content and structure of the course are also discussed using Jeffrey Howard's (1998) framework for transitioning from a traditional to an academic service-learning course.

Introduction

This study considers the impact of service-learning on fifty undergraduate students enrolled in two sections of Social Foundations of Education at a private liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic region. Data was collected throughout the spring 2006 semester during which students completed twenty hours of fieldwork in one of three educational settings, including a child care center located on the college campus, a school for students identified with severe emotional and behavioral support needs, and a local middle school conducting an after-school homework program. Working within the framework of a new faculty study group on service-learning, I was interested in examining the impact of service-learning on my students' understanding of course themes and its reciprocal effect on the content and structure of the course itself.

Throughout the semester, students in the course were asked to grapple with the following broad question. What does it mean to educate all children in a democracy? In class we used this question as a framework when we discussed students, teachers, schools, and curriculum in the United States. The primary goal of this introductory, discussion-based course was to have students, many of whom came from privileged socio-economic status (SES) and private-school backgrounds, leave the course with a deeper understanding of the complexity of American education. For many years prior to 2006, students who enrolled in Social Foundations of Education completed fieldwork within an educational setting in the community. They logged their hours and wrote a series of personal reflection papers, but instructors were not expected to use class time to make explicit connections between course content and community service. In many respects the service became what Howard (1998) describes as "a sidebar activity" (p. 21). In my work with the faculty study group, I proposed to transform the course into one in which service would be at the heart of the learning endeavor.

Creating a Service-Learning Course

While there is no single definition of service-learning, scholars in the field generally agree that service-learning emphasizes reciprocity, collaboration, and reflection in a way that provides mutual benefit to the student and to the community partner (Erikson & Anderson, 1997; Waterman, 1997; Ward & Nitscheke-Shaw, 2001). Although proponents of service-learning in teacher education agree on these basic components, they view the purposes and effects of service-learning through many different lenses. Some theorists (Eyler & Giles, 1999; Donahue, 1999;...

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