Lessons learned in service‐learning: personnel preparation through community action

Abstract

As we move through the 21st century, the need to prepare professionals to work effectively with students from diverse backgrounds is of utmost importance. This paper discusses the use of service‐learning in a pre‐service preparation program at a metropolitan university. Service‐learning was infused into a course examining issues and trends in urban special education with the goal of partnering pre‐professionals with children and youth from the surrounding community to help them to identify and address social issues. A description of the process of implementation is provided, along with outcomes and lessons learned. It was established that service‐learning can be a viable tool in pre‐professional training for engaging students in community action while concurrently challenging their notions of working with culturally and linguistically diverse populations.