Balancing classroom ready with community ready: enabling agency to engage with community through critical service learning

ABSTRACT

Recent initial teacher education policy and regulatory frameworks privilege “classroom ready” discourses. Taking up “readiness” as technical skill requiring more “practice” leads to narrowing of teachers’ roles and efficacy with increasing pressure and regulation that marginalises ideals to equip pre-service teachers to be “community ready”. We argue that enabling preservice teacher agency to engage with community beyond notions of mastering bounded classroom practice is critical to teachers’ roles. Supporting teachers to teach in context as engaged global citizens requires a readiness of relational understanding and skills about the lived experiences of learners, and their wider community contexts. Data from a critical service learning case study highlight how preservice teacher agency to engage with community is conceptualised and experienced in simultaneously beneficial and challenging ways. These findings indicate the complex, yet necessarily significant contributions of service learning experiences to the development of preservice teacher “readiness”.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• community
• classroom ready
• wider professional experience
• service learning

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Office for Learning and Teaching [SP14-4613].

Notes on contributors

Peta Salter

Peta Salter Peta is a Lecturer in Education whose research has explored wider professional experiences, Asia literacies, and cultural perspectives in teacher education and the Australian curriculum.

Kelsey Halbert

Kelsey Halbert Kelsey in a Senior Lecturer in Education whose research focuses on student and teacher agency in the school and the community, specifically citizenship education, service-learning and cultural education.