Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Teacher Education Through Service-Learning/Social Justice

• In Event: 46.077 - Pushing Beyond the Project: (Re)Defining Justice Through Community Engagement

Abstract

In “Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Teacher Education through Service-learning/Social Justice”, presenter #1 will explore data from three years of implementing a service-learning pedagogy with early childhood pre-service teachers. Using a cascading model of practice, this pedagogy is grounded in real world situations, is carried out by practitioners, in conjunction with the community at large, and has a direct and passionate investment in what is occurring in the classroom. This type of education is largely carried out as collaboration with people in context, and not to people (Freire, 1970). Moreover, it is done in the company of peers, construing the domain of education as contingent on interactions and relationships (Pascal & Bertram, 2012). Through action and interaction, this praxeology drives our work, while revealing underlying assumptions and helping to generate new epistemologies. Conversely, it then reveals how teacher educators can change their approaches to working with young children and their families.
In order to explore the learning and participation within this critical service-learning pedagogy, the researcher considered the intersection of two theoretical frames: 1. Praxeological Learning (Pascal & Bertram, 2012; Winterbottom & Mazzocco, In Press) and 2. Butin’s (2003) poststructuralist perspectives on service-learning.
Over the past three years, our university teacher education program, located at a regional campus of a large research university in the mid-western United States and the local community have been collaborating on praxeological-learning. The structure of our program requires a large amount of time in field-based classrooms. In March of their sophomore year, approximately 20-50 preservice teacher candidates apply to the early childhood program; thirty applicants are selected and admitted to the program for the following fall semester. Once admitted, the pre-service teachers’ classes are sequenced and they travel together as a cohort for the next four semesters until graduation.

During their early childhood classes, the students are part of a cascading knowledge-of-practice. This cascading model is one where the teacher educators teach service-learning pedagogy to the pre-service teachers who are actively involved using service-learning in local schools. The pre-service teachers then teach service-learning to the students in their field placement classrooms via the implementation of projects. Subsequently, the students teach others about service-learning through their community efforts. The integrated cascading approach offers students an opportunity to learn in a way that is most natural to them, as opposed to a segmented approach stressing only isolated skills and concepts (Verducci & Pope 2001).
By leveraging the cultural, social, and human capital of higher education, service-learning collaborators are able to make a visible difference in the communities they are a part of (O’Grady, 2000; Sleeter, 2001). Through the collective use of service-learning, we examined transformative characteristics of the participating students and connected praxeological pedagogy with poststructuralist epistemology.

Author

• Christian Winterbottom, University of North Florida