Requisite Community Engagement for Teacher Education: A Different Take on Service Learning

This article examines pre-service teachers' responses to their experiences with community engagement as a service learning project as part of an introductory Education course at a large, midwestern urban university in the United States. It is typical for students in pre-service Education courses to participate in service learning in schools or community centers, but it is less common for Education courses to require service learning projects in which the focus is for students to engage with adult community members. I argue that it is imperative for students to become familiar with communities in which they teach and learn from residents' "funds of knowledge" (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). A service learning project with a community center, the focus of which is empowerment of local residents, is described. Located in an urban neighborhood in which most of the residents are of a racial minority different from most of the pre-service students themselves, the center provided the space for the class to learn from adult community residents about issues surrounding empowerment and community engagement. Drawing upon Freire's (2003) notion of praxis I present findings of a qualitative analysis of students' response papers in the context of a curriculum that focuses on critical social justice and the development of culturally competent teachers.