Service Learning
By working collaboratively on community initiatives, educators build strong family and community relationships.
What It Is
Service learning combines learning and community action goals. In the words of the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, it is “a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.”
How It Works
At the university level, undergraduate and graduate students in fields like education, social work, or library and information sciences are given opportunities to apply classroom concepts through direct service in public or nonprofit community-based organizations. Faculty and community partners collaborate to find a service-learning placement that matches students’ interest, and over the course of weeks and months, students apply course content to community-based activities. Students have structured opportunities to reflect on their experience and typically conclude their learning with a culminating or capstone project that benefits the organization as well as demonstrates the new skills, understanding, and competencies they have developed.¹
What Changes
Among prospective teachers, service learning has led to an enhanced ability to self-reflect, identify, and appreciate strengths of families, and greater self-awareness and humility in building positive relationships with children and families of diverse backgrounds.² It has also resulted in an increase in preservice teachers’ understanding of families and their less judgmental feelings toward them.³ Moreover, service learning increases their ability and skills to work with diverse families and their motivation to explore their own biases and beliefs.⁴ However, service learning can unintentionally reinforce cultural and social biases if they are not carried out with consistent opportunities for reflection, suggesting the importance of close facilitation and supervision.⁵ Research has also shown that the organizations that host and partner with students reap benefits as well.⁶
Approach In Action
Through a course titled Working with Socioculturally Diverse Families, teacher candidates at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, engaged in service-learning opportunities with families from diverse backgrounds, including African American, Latina, and Burmese families, as well as families who had a child with disabilities and families who were from low socioeconomic backgrounds.⁷ The service-learning experience included two components:
A Family Mentorship Experience
Over a four-month period, students participated in three to four routine activities — such as accompanying the family on a shopping trip, attending a family activity, eating dinner together, or spending time at the park — with a mentor family. The purpose of these initial activities was for the candidates and families to get to know one another and establish rapport. The candidates then collaborated with families to provide a “service” relative to children’s schooling. The service activities ranged from child care and tutoring support, to assisting families in locating community resources for their children.
School-Based Family Event Planning
Students were required to plan and implement a family-centered event at their placement school. For the school-based family events, candidates and course instructors met with school personnel and families to determine family priorities for support at their children’s school. Events included a resource fair, assembly of summer fun packets, homework help evenings, and ESL classes.
As a result of the service-learning experience, candidates came to understand the uniqueness of different families, how intimidating schools might be for families, and an increased empathy and appreciation for the complicated nature of many families’ lives. Students also developed greater understanding of how families’ practices and resources can be used to reinforce children’s learning and the importance of parent-teacher partnerships.
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Endnotes
¹ Jenkins, A., & Sheehey, P. (2012). A checklist for implementing service-learning in higher education. Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, 4, 52–60; Garner, P. W., & Parker, T. S. (2016) Service-learning linking family child care providers, community partners, and preservice professionals. Early Child Development and Care, 186(9), 1466–1475. doi: 10.1080/03004430.2015.1102136
² Lund, D. E., & Lee, L. (2015). Fostering cultural humility among pre-service teachers: Connecting with children and youth of immigrant families through service-learning. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’éducation 38(2), 2–30.
³ Hampshire, K., Havercroft, K., Luy, M., & Call, J. (2015). Confronting assumptions: Service learning as a medium for preparing early childhood special education preservice teachers to work with families. Teacher Education Quarterly, 15, 83–96.
⁴ Able, H., Ghulmani, H., Mallous, R., & Glazier, J. (2014). Service learning: A promising strategy for connecting future teachers to the lives of diverse children and their families. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 35, 6–21.
⁵ Dunn-Kenney, M. (2010). Can service learning reinforce social and cultural bias? Exploring a popular model of family involvement for early childhood teacher candidates. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 31, 37–48.
⁶ Geller, J. D., Zuckerman, N. & Seidel, A. (2016). Service-learning as a catalyst for community development: How do community partners benefit from service-learning? Education and Urban Society, 48(2), 151–175.
⁷ Able et al. (2014).
