The education of pre-service teachers in diversity and community is a very important issue, and one that is often overlooked in the annals of education. In many contexts, including teaching ESL, pre-service teachers could benefit from academic service learning. This particular method of education and activity can provide them with values such as hard work, community, and interaction with diverse cultures. In an academic service learning context, it is important for pre-service teachers to learn about how to deal with minority groups before entering these situations. These types of learning interventions can equip pre-service teachers with invaluable perspective and instill values of social change in them, enabling them to become advocates for those diverse students they are likely to teach once they enter the field. This paper provides a justification for the use of service learning in order to inform the practice of pre-service teachers.
Communities are groups of individuals that work together as a seamless whole – ideally, a community represents an informed citizenry who have the knowledge and skills to participate in discussions and active initiatives to improve and better the rest of the community at large (Corporation for National and Community Service, 2002). In communities, there is often diversity – members of the group who belong to a different gender, ethnicity, or others. In many contexts, teachers have to deal with diversity students; in an ESL context, this is particularly true, as the primary goal is to teach minority students English. Aboriginals and other examples of diversity take a certain skill set and sensitivity in order to effectively teach them.
In order to facilitate this culture of service, service-learning is suggested as a means to teach young people the best ways by which to serve their community. Academic service-learning often takes the form of after-school or extracurricular initiatives which can teach a great many skills. The teaching of ESL can also fall under the blanket of service-learning, as it allows them to learn about the facets of teaching while allowing others to learn. In this way, both parties are helped, and equity is more easily achieved (Corporation for National and Community Service, 2002). One of the most important members of this community are teachers, as “education is recognized as having the power to facilitate democracy and expand opportunities for students” (Carrington and Saggers 2008, p. 795). By providing students with the chance to have as democratic a role possible in their community, they facilitate equity and fair living, a laudable goal for any individual or group. It offers a scholarship of engagement that connects the teacher deeper with their community and its students, providing them with a broader understanding of academic scholarship (Barker, 2004).
Service learning, though often thought of as a means of enhancing education through civic duty, can also be inverted to teach individuals about being civic through higher education (Boyle-Baise et al., 2006). Pre-service learners, if provided with participation in service-learning in both domestic and international settings, will improve their abilities in civic engagement, cultural competencies, and career clarification (Miller & Gonzalez, 2009). This service learning allows pre-service learners to become more aware of what their local community needs, and how best to communicate with those learning English as a second language; it permits these potential instructors to have the skills they need to provide the needed assistance to aboriginals or other minorities who have various cultural obstacles to overcome in order to successfully learn English.
Often, pre-service teachers are not given the proper training to deal with the classroom context and its many complexities. Teaching-learning processes are often lacking in development among pre-service teachers, and they do not develop the proper cognitive perspective to view their own processes through. With the help of academic service learning, contexts outside a classroom setting can be presented to them that will help them face their preconceived notions of what to do as a teacher, and how to act (Eilam & Poyas, 2009).
Service learning has been shown to be significantly more helpful in teaching pre-service teachers both academic material and more personal lessons about themselves, increasing motivation and reflection of the course material. It allows theory and practice to connect in a meaningful, informative way that is authentic to the pre-service learner, permitting them a singular experience and increasing the understanding of the content in a course (Hart & King, 2007).
Pedagogy (the act of teaching) requires both education and reflection on the part of the teacher before he or she enters the service mode of their occupation. Service-learning, upon reflection by many teachers, can provide transformative learning in the form of ideology critique and utopian critique, both social theories that allow an individual to see injustices in their own community, including the treatment of minorities and aboriginals. Through service-learning, reflection on one’s community on these subjects can take place (Carrington and Selva, 2010).
There are three dimensions of pedagogy that are important to remember in order to allow the pre-service teacher to benefit the most from their service-learning experience. Intellectual quality in one’s classroom permits the students to benefit from highly stimulating and intriguing material, and ensures that accurate, targeted material is taught to the students. This gives them the raw material from which to apply learning techniques and absorb the information. Next, a curriculum must have significance; the material being taught must be shown and proven to be important and memorable to the students. This injects meaning into the material and the classroom setting, and gives them a personal context to frame the data around. This all culminates in quality learning, provided the pedagogue gives the student a quality learning environment – effectively taught material that is both high in intellectual quality and significant to their lives (NSW Dept. of Education, 2003). These are skills that a pre-service teacher must learn in order to become an effective instructor; academic service-learning can provide that through instilling a unique perspective on teaching.
One significant problem that can be found in pre-service learners is a decided lack of enlightened perspective on their own views of minorities or groups outside those familiar to them. What’s more, they may be confused as to what exact roles a teacher and student are supposed to have for each other. There are many ambiguities and assumptions carried by pre-service teachers that need to be addressed in order to make them effective instructors. Real-world learning projects, which teach pre-service teachers the tenants of diversity and learning, provide these teachers with the needed perspective that they are often lacking in a classroom setting (Ryan et al., 2009).
Perceptions of urban and poor ethnic youth are already disastrous and negative, preventing them from having the same kind of support that makes it easier for privileged youth to excel in class – pre-service teachers must be exposed to their own contributions to these perceptions in order to change them. Service-learning projects can expose these teachers to the urban youth that are so easily stereotyped and disenfranchised, giving them a personal experience with them to help them get rid of their assumptions and biases (Conner, 2010). There is a significant aspect of social justice that must be applied to the teaching of urban and minority youth, as the teacher is one of the most important advocates for their success. In order to properly equip a pre-service teacher for working in a diverse setting, field work and service-learning in diverse classrooms is absolutely necessary for this additional perspective. This can permit pre-service teachers to see themselves rightfully as positive agents of change for students in their classroom, instead of perpetuating the same attitudes that could keep them disenfranchised (Catapano, 2006).
Cross-cultural immersion is one way in which to provide pre-service workers for the challenge of dealing with international or diverse students. Zhao et al. (2009) performed a study in which American pre-service elementary teachers went to China to perform student teaching and learning. In the process, they learned a great deal about strategies to help them respect Chinese culture and increase empathy towards those of a different ethnicity who did not speak their language. In short, the cross-cultural immersion provided them with an opportunity to learn with and from these students; having direct contact with minority and diverse students can make them more comfortable with the idea of speaking to someone with a language barrier, granting them a more global perspective on learning and teaching. Certain anxieties about the practice of ESL can be confronted and overcome, which is necessary if they are to work with aboriginals or minorities in their later service work (Zhao et al., 2009).
Community-based learning is a basic approach to teacher education that allows teachers to become more culturally responsible for those around them, thus furthering the idea of community in their own narratives. Volunteering in community services permits these pre-service teachers to interact with others in their community and their culture, learning more about them and discovering the various aspects of their own identity as a server of this community. Placing them in an unfamiliar context grants them the ability to face their own prejudices and attitudes about minorities and social justice. In this way, cultural relevance can be imparted on the pre-service teacher as an important aspect of their role as an instructor (Farnsworth, 2010).
The results of working with pre-service teachers in a service-learning setting are tremendous. Setting one’s thinking in a narrative framework can help to provide a more linear understanding of how one’s own prejudgments and understandings of other cultures are changed and altered as a result of interacting with real examples of that culture (Milton-Kukner et al., 2010). Pre-service teachers are granted the opportunity to reinvent themselves and learn new things about themselves, permitting them to be more sensitive when dealing with aboriginal students once their service work is begun.
In conclusion, the benefits of academic service-learning for pre-service teachers (and subsequently, their students) are incalculable. Given the important role that teachers play in the shaping and motivation of students, and the rampant problems with disconnection and disenfranchisement from aboriginals, urban and minority youth, it becomes more vital than ever that teachers be given the opportunity to expose themselves to new experiences, so as not to form unfair judgments about them. Becoming more involved in their community and taking initiatives to experience diversity in as many forms as possible enables them to broaden their perspective, to the point where they can effectively advocate for these students in a way that would not be possible without service-learning initiatives. In short, academic service-learning equips pre-service teachers with the broadest form of learning they could experience, learning both about themselves and those they are meant to instruct.
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