A Typology of Conscious Decision Making for Service-Learning Field Experiences: Labeling Practice and Identifying Praxis

Introduction

The chapters in this edited book utilize a critical lens to examine the intersections of service-learning, field experiences, and the development of teacher candidates. Each chapter addresses a variety of service-learning implementations. These various enactments of service-learning range from the perspective of service-learning as a critical foundation of teacher education to viewing service-learning as a pedagogical method to assist pre-service teachers in building the necessary knowledge to teach learners from families and communities whose first language is not the dominant language.

Within these chapters, readers have encountered distinctive and novel implementations of service-learning within teacher education including physical education courses, science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, and courses that focus on students with exceptionalities. Further, this book positions all modes of teacher preparation including: (1) traditional teacher education and certification programs, (2) alternative certification programs, and (3) undergraduate pre-service programming, as well as (4) graduate in-service coursework. All areas are appropriate spaces for service-learning work. Within the chapters, differing sites have also been examined for the suitability of service-learning; readers encounter service-learning embedded in coursework and field experiences in conventional field sites and situated within community sites. While the majority of chapters engage service-learning in the US, several significant chapters offer perspectives of service-learning within teacher education in other nations and states. Central to all chapters is the notion that service-learning has the capacity to be a transformative practice, especially when functioning as a mechanism to shift dispositions and expand cultural frames of reference. A common thread throughout all chapters has been the notion of service-learning as enacting and representing culturally responsive teaching and inclusive teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1992; 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 2000).

This concluding chapter diverges from the discussion of service-learning as fostering and promoting culturally relevant and responsive practice. Service-learning as both a pedagogical approach and an epistemological method can be defined in a variety of ways. The final chapter offers thoughts regarding how teacher educators might begin to both conceptualize and classify service-learning field experiences. The typology presented in this chapter is intended to support the critical metacognitive processes that teacher educators may use to frame the service-learning field experience, deconstruct systematic inequities inherent in US educational practice, and ensure reciprocity and authentic partnerships. This conceptualization or series of choices around central features of service-learning field experiences will allow a framework from which teacher educators might proactively plan to better achieve their learning outcomes. And although this chapter closes this book, so to speak, it is the authors’ intention that it might spark further debate, thinking, and consideration of how teacher educators craft service-learning within teacher education and how teacher educators categorize service-learning field experiences.