From Service Learning to Learning to Serve: Preparing Urban English Teachers as Organic Intellectual

• In Event: Too Much Not to Know: Considering a Broader and Bolder Approach to Equity and Access in Teaching and Teacher Education Policy

Abstract

This paper argues that teaching English in the city is among the more daunting practices due, in part, to the multiple and changing ecologies of languages, texts, and inequities that saturate the urban landscape, as teaching the word is directly tied to the conditions of the world (Kinloch, 2008; Kirkland, 2008; Morrell, 2008). To better understand this dilemma, the author profiles a series of urban high school English classrooms, thus illustrating a disturbing portrait of fierce new, yet reductive, educational requirements set against the backdrop of larger social stresses for teaching and living in urban America. As deep despair gripped the particular urban English classrooms he studied, the author recounts a need for a new type of English teacher grown from the communities in which she or he teaches, willing to work with students to meet the demands of the day in order to transform chronic conditions of hopelessness. While incredibly difficult, the author suggests that this challenge presents a powerful opportunity for grooming new English teachers who want to transform the unjust social conditions that blight urban schools and communities (cf. Fruchter, 2007; Noguera, 2003), as well as a chance to rethink teaching at large consistent with Gramsci’s (1971) idea of the “organic intellectual.” How, then, can (English) teachers be prepared to enter classrooms and communities to inspire change and, in so doing, help to rewrite communities as they become more effective teachers of students housed in such communities? More simply put, how might community-grounded approaches to teacher education such as service learning, for example, help teachers learn to serve?

Based on a three-year ethnographic study of a group urban English teachers (both pre-service and in-service), the author found that service learning can act as critical pedagogy, where new urban teachers learn to serve by working with students and textual tools in the city to adjust and amend their and a community’s thinking around conditions of urban plight, social neglect, and student achievement (Carter, 2009). In doing so, the teachers he studied learned to cultivate strong roots within their urban communities, forge powerful relationships with local issues and struggles that connect directly to their students and their students’ experiences, and ultimately build real and relevant connections to those communities most in need (see Gramsci, 1971). Armed with an openness to serve and a desire to bring voice to the people and the stories of their communities, the author explains that such teachers also learned how to paint narratives of the everyday experiences, struggles, hopes, and triumphs of real families and neighborhoods, of people sharing their own visions of a new city (such as urban gardens and green urban communities) while taking a critical stance on issues so endemic to urban settings—homelessness, poverty, violence, disease, hunger, and rampant mis-education—that they are seen as opaque or worse normal. The paper concludes by offering three key recommendations for resituating teacher education in real communities and in student lives. Approaches such as service learning offer a path to begin.

Author

• David E. Kirkland, New York University/Michigan State University