Critical service-learning: promoting values orientation and enterprise skills in pre-service teacher programmes

ABSTRACT

Experiential learning pathways within education programmes such as Service-learning are a means to enrich the learning of pre-service teachers. As a pathway, Service-learning provides value-oriented learning focused on inclusion, diversity, and difference. This paper adopts critical social theory to examine how, along with these values, critical Service-learning promotes a deeper comprehension of values such as empathy, civic responsibility, social justice, and equity. Our paper also studies how, along with values, enterprise skills develop when pre-service teachers adopt a self-responsible, decision-making approach to implementing inclusion, social justice, and equity. Fifty-one data sets from interviews, questionnaires, and reflection logs with two groups of students over two semesters were examined to comprehend the unique experiences of students as they navigated through values and enterprise skills. The study concludes by reiterating the value of incorporating nontraditional ways of learning that align with the traditional pedagogical offerings for pre-service teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Enterprise skills
• pre-service teacher
• service-learning
• teacher education
• values

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Queensland University of Technology for the Early Career Researcher Grant to undertake the study in 2010 and the participants in the various aspects of the study on Service-learning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Radha Iyer

Radha Iyer is a Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. She teaches in the areas of social and cultural issues in education. Her teaching and research interests include literacy/multiliteracies, gender/poststructural feminism, critical discourse analysis, critical pedagogy, and critical social theory.

Suzanne Carrington

Suzanne Carrington is Professor and Head of School at the Queensland University of Technology. She teaches and researches in the areas of inclusive education, policy and practice, learning support, autistic spectrum disorder, teaching/professional development, and service learning.

Louise Mercer

Louise Mercer is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Australian Catholic University. Prior to becoming an academic, Louise was a teacher and school psychologist in Canada. Louise’s teaching and research interests focus on inclusive education, community engagement, critical reflective writing, and preparing teachers to support the learning of students with learning difficulties.

Gitta Selva

Gitta Selva studied communications at New York University. Gitta contributed to this article as a Senior Research Assistant for the Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology. She has also worked as Program Director at Gesell Institute of Child Development in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.