Nurturing Cultural Humility and Self-Reflexivity in Preservice Teachers Through Short-Term Community Service-Learning Projects

• In Event: 75.038 - Moving Beyond Cultural Competency: Supporting Teachers to Build Cultural Humility

Abstract

High impact pedagogies that nurture students to explore beyond their comfort zones and broaden their frames of reference are reported to increase post-secondary student engagement and strengthen student success factors (Kuh, 2009). Community placements and service-learning programs are two possibilities that extend the classroom outward and into a variety of complex lived realities, exposing students to unfamiliarity, confusion, and instances of often difficult self-reflexivity. When we consider that education students are simultaneously post-secondary learners who can benefit from greater cultural humility intrinsically, and future teachers who will serve as educators in diverse environments, the responsibility to educate for cultural humility seems doubly important. Andreotti (2013) suggests that educators, like students, are conditioned but not inevitably pre-determined by factors that are historical, social, and cultural in nature. This tendency to think about and react to unfamiliar situations in a prescriptive way can be significantly altered by pedagogies such as service-learning.

Community service-learning can be described as a pedagogy and practice that weaves together curricular or co-curricular learning outcomes with a collaborative and meaningful volunteer project in the broader community (Bringle & Hatcher, 2013; University of Ottawa, 2012). Given the necessary interplay of relationship building, experiential learning, self-reflexivity, and identity negotiation, service-learning is in a position to nurture cultural humility, which Tervalon and Murray-Garcia (1998) describe as a life-long commitment to social justice, self-critique, and a humble relinquishment of complete control and “expert” status. Service-learning is reported to help learners bridge the often expansive gap between theoretical classroom content and complex, contextual, “real-world” issues (Erickson & Anderson, 1997; Lester, Tomkovick, Wells, Flunker, & Kickul, 2005; Powers, 2004).

This presentation first documents the conception and evolution of the required Community Field Experience (CFE) course within a university teacher education program, which facilitates roughly 500 service-learning placements for pre-service teachers annually. Second, we explore qualitative data from pre-service teachers before and after their service-learning placement, collected as part of a pre- and post-survey pilot study. Additionally, this presentation draws on student feedback and reflections that are featured on the CFE website, and that point to the development of key concepts within a cultural humility framework.

Findings suggest that community service-learning programs such as the CFE can provide for some pre-service teachers a foundational understanding of some cultural humility tenets such as flexibility, self-reflexivity, and humbleness. When explored in greater detail, data shows that there is also a developmental opportunity at the institutional level to engage in what Tervalon and Murray-Garcia (1998) call institutional self-reflection. By shifting the gaze from what a student learns to what an institution learns through such collaborative programs, we conclude that even successful programs – like successful students – have opportunities to engage in critical reflection, re-evaluate previously held assumptions, and address power imbalances.

Authors

• Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, The University of British Columbia

• Kari Grain, University of British Columbia