Introduction
Pre-service teachers get into the education field with unexplained and problematic assumptions about learning and teaching. Service learning helps newly trained teachers understand the field of education better and clear enlighten their misinformed perceptions and unexplained assumptions. Education sector requires organized and neat learners with time management skills and well-developed skills. It also is always in constant need to create full comprehension of loosely understood concepts about teaching, students and schools. Newly trained teachers have a naïve epistemological notion that knowledge is simple and easy to transmit. Using Butin’s conceptual framework, the pre-service teachers gain complex ways of learning and ways of deducing meaning. Newly trained teachers create helpful notions about education in relation to life in general. Providing real world experiences to pre-service teachers provides resources for solving fundamental challenges in the education sector.
Butin`s Assertions Towards Academic Pre-Service Learning
According to Butin, service-learning experiences belong to four discrete lenses. The four viewpoints include political, cultural, post modern or poststructuralist and technical perspectives. His framework is integral in providing highlights on the intricate hierarchical relationships between learners, sites and those offering the learning services. He reiterates that a comprehensive analysis is necessary to provide an understanding of impacts of learning on stakeholders. On placing learners to a service learning facility, supervising teachers provide guidance to those undergoing practicum. The learners abide by the laws of the jurisdictions that house the schools they undertake their service learning. They also abide by the rules of the schools that offer them the chance to learn while teaching. A service learner finds it easy to accept the behavior and practices observed at their stations rather than question the status quo since they have no say in establishing the prevailing rules and curricula. In order to have a better understanding of the contradictory pedagogical knowledge and political motives in different communities, students work in as many stations as possible. They then get well prepared for the complexities of enacting their knowledge and skills in their chores as educators.
Benefits of Academic Pre-Service Learning
Service learning has the benefit of closing the social and cultural gap between teachers and their students. To close the gap between the children’s expectations and the teachers’ ability, teachers should get a concise knowledge of equity, global interconnectedness and diversity. This knowledge is not part of direct curriculum of many universities that train teachers. In addition, nature of teachers’ duties demand that they meet fragmented demands of political expectations. They need to meet partisan claims and bureaucratic standards of the interests of the communities they provide their services to. Service learning provides an amicable framework of accomplishing the needs of the teachers to understand these bureaucracies and remain focused to deliver quality services to their students.
In the present world, there is increased push for teachers to produce graduates conscious of economic competition. Teacher education is currently sandwiched between the system’s demands to produce skills for competitive economy and cultural demands of graduates in a quest for meaning to life. The faculty and students are accountable for the quest for high standards, but the time provided for teacher education programs is overly short. The system of education does not provide for time to equip teachers with these essential needs. Therefore, a traditional framework of pedagogy in the field of academia that privileges top-to-down presumptions of knowledge transfer is not possible. Butin’s top-down framework of transferring knowledge from faculty to and relations according to authority between the community and institution and institution and faculty. Lack of proliferate teacher training makes service teaching the best option to address the deficiencies.
In Butin’s cultural perspective, an inclusive school community has its teachers, students and the community work together in a democratic relation. The stakeholders work together towards high education quality, human rights, civic actions and social justice. Getting committed to this course demands that teachers gain insightful attachment to their community languages, culture and values. A cultural viewpoint of service learning reflects on the meaning of practice for people and institutions involved. It lays emphases on the “people’s” meaning through and within the context of innovation. The framework aids in understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity in the perspective of cultural backgrounds.
There is a link between the cultural perspective and technical perspective. Cultural viewpoint in service learning assists an individual to extend and support civic engagements. It enhances learners’ sense of community belongingness largely than they ever imagined. It is a means of fostering respect for diversity and increased tolerance to differentiation. The learner gains awareness of community concerns. He develops a sound ethical and moral sense and gets encouraged to undertake civic engagements and volunteerism. From this cultural perspective of service learning, Butin notes that diversity in a learner’s placement site acts as a critical mediator between societal responsibility and individual self knowledge.
He further argues that individuals come to better understanding, gets to respect and engage with civilizing popularity of diverse communities. Such outstanding benefits come as a result of an individual’s engagement with people of different races, ethical backgrounds, economic classes and sexual orientations. Other than attending classes and teaching students, newly trained teachers attend to community chores. Associating with the society outside classroom scenario gives the best cultural experience. Pre-service teachers work in home support programs. They work with refugee students living in difficult situations because of poverty. After the service learning experience, the pre-service teachers become responsive to culturally oriented pedagogies.
Cultural aspect of service learning helps learners polish their misled understanding of various communities. Some pre-service teachers go into service learning expecting aggression and cruelty of the people they interact serve. Some expect drug addicted caregivers, withdrawn and malnourished children in care facilities. They find out the truth that the caregivers are mother figures and the children are healthy and happy. Some develop superior sense of personal worth by being able to utilize their skills to impact positively on others’ lives. At the same time, some pre-service teachers get to learn that problems that affect some people are actually worse that they earlier imagined. These observations and experiences help the pre-service teacher to provide personalized services when they resume duties as fully qualified educators.
Political Lens of Butin’s framework involves empowerment and promotion of practices and voices of non-dominant and disempowered groups in the society. Development and review of a socially just education system requires a culture than values and treats people with their knowledge and experiences. Within the political perspective, students, the community and teachers challenge hegemonic norms of the society. They get to dispute injustices and unfairness in who controls, defines and places limits to access to knowhow and power. The political framework raises questions to understand whose voices the system suppresses against those that have the say. Pre-service learners get to know who makes decisions and what criteria they use. Additionally, the learners get a gist of whom benefits from the decisions made and who loses. They also get an insight to what degree innovations are repetitions, revocation or reinforcement of the status quo.
Service learning does not encourage pre-service teachers to straightforwardly empower the array of people in their sites. At this stage of their training, the pre-service teachers have a duty to watch how systems in organizations and the society treat different people. They learn the best ways to deal with differences in the society without losing focus on the rights of various populaces. The pre-service teachers gain experiences of how to deal with people of different political affiliations and beliefs. The teacher’s focus will not be to assimilate such groups of people into the mainstream system of political inclination and beliefs. The teachers’ core business will be to provide the necessary tools for surviving in the new location. This could include language and understanding of new concepts of life.
Through the political framework, pre-service teachers are able to identify strengths of various cultural identities. They become assertive of disempowerment actions of some groups of people in the society. They understand the value of cultural diversity with respect to political correctness. Cultural diversity is a strength that contributes to learning in the society. Having the political knowledge of one’s place of work helps teachers bring up students whose ideals are relevant to the society. They become minds that can transform the society from oppressive culture to justice. This is the essence of education; to transform the society to a better place for all.
Postmodern or poststructuralist perspective of service learning focuses on how the process of service learning creates, sustains and disrupts the boarders and ethics by which human beings make sense of themselves and the world. The concept’s major concern is to understand how service learning establishes, encourages and disrupts various unarticulated societal norms of being and thinking. The viewpoint questions and to what degree service learning supports or undermines people’s notions of issues such as learning, teaching, self and otherness.
The perspective seeks to answer questions such as who serves and who does the service. The concept helps the pre-service teacher to understand and clearly distinguish his role as a teacher and the role of a student as a learner. This viewpoint helps the learner discern if the service learning disrupts or perpetuates people’s notion of who the teacher is and who the student is. It also helps the learners to analyze whether or not they are gender sensitive, racially and status-bound individuals.
Technical Lens focuses on the pedagogical effectiveness of the service learning. It served the roles of superior teaching for superior learning. The approach focuses on the actual innovation, its characteristics and components and its creation and introduction as a technology. It highlights the technical considerations of implementation. Experiences of pre-service teachers in the technical perspective extend their level of understanding. It enhances students’ transfer of knowledge and deepens critical thinking.
Conclusion
References
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