Case Study 17C
Prospective Teachers’ Work with Homeless Youth: Articulating the Value of Service Learning in Teacher Education
Heidi L. Hallman
This case study conceptualizes service learning as having the potential to disrupt deficit theorizing on the part of teachers (Sleeter, 2008), thus encouraging teacher candidates to critically question schooling and patterns of inequity. Deficit theorizing, or blaming school failure on students’ individual characteristics and backgrounds, is antithetical to prosocial education, as prosocial education encourages educators to develop strategies for positive response and empathy toward students. Because we know that many preservice teachers learn to teach by teaching their university peers in mock teaching environments (Shrofel, 1991), many beginning teachers have little direct, field-based experiences working with youth in schools before student teaching. Therefore, the attitudes that beginning teachers express early in their careers may influence how they will develop as teachers. Service learning offers a way to reenvision the relationship between teacher and students, countering a teacher-centered model of instruction (Cuban, 1993), comprised, in part, of “a conception in which a teacher stands before students who face forward in seats and who are supposedly poised to listen and learn” (Portes & Smagorinsky, 2010, p. 236). Service learning works against this model, becoming both a counternarrative and conduit for preservice teachers to reconsider the relationship between teacher and students.
Service learning in teacher education in this case study is also framed as an early field experience for prospective teachers, and early and diverse field experiences in teacher education programs have been touted as one of the keys to successful teacher preparation (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Feiman-Nemser & Buchman, 1987; Hallman & Burdick, 2011; Sleeter, 2008; Zeichner, 2010). Holistically, such field experiences exist to promote preservice teachers’ understanding and practice of culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2001), as well as to bridge beginning teachers’ reflection on the constructs of theory and practice present in the teaching act (Shulman, 2004). Though field experiences have been acknowledged as an important component of teacher education programs, little work has explored the unique qualities of community-based settings as potential sites for teachers’ learning (see Coffey, 2010). Coffey suggests that community-based settings have the power to transform the ways that beginning teachers think about the effects of schooling in their students’ lives, as well as the extent to which social factors influence students’ success in school.
Throughout the course of one academic year, I investigated how four preservice English teachers conceptualized service learning in a community-based field site. The following questions framed my inquiry:
The four beginning teachers featured in this case study completed at least forty hours of service learning as tutors/mentors of adolescents involved in an after-school initiative for homeless youth. Framed as an exploratory qualitative case study (Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995, 2000), the study* took place in the context of Family Partnership’s (all names of people and places are pseudonyms) day center for homeless families, as well as in the teacher education program at the University of Kansas. The youth at Family Partnership with whom the preservice teachers worked over the course of the year were homeless during the time of the study, and all were officially part of Family Partnership’s program for homeless families. During the entire course of the study, the preservice teachers were enrolled in the Secondary English/Language Arts Education Program at the University of Kansas and were also enrolled in an English education methods course as well as other education courses that comprised their teacher education program. Consistent with the description of instrumental case studies provided by Stake (2000), the study followed this small group of preservice teachers’ work in a community-based field site in a detailed manner, aligned with the commitment of preparing beginning teachers to teach in diverse educational contexts.
Context of the Case Study
Family Promise is a national organization framed by a model with a successful history (Family Promise, 2011a). The program has been implemented nationwide in multiple communities and was adopted in Lawrence, Kansas, the community in which this study was situated, in November of 2008. Family Promise, a nonprofit organization committed to helping low-income families achieve lasting independence, is oftentimes contrasted with a “shelter model” of assisting homeless individuals and families, as the program was founded on the premise of assisting homeless families by providing “an integrated approach that begins with meeting immediate needs but reaches much further to help people achieve independence and to alleviate the root causes of poverty” (Family Promise, 2011b, para. 2). My purposeful selection of a community-based field site focused on serving homeless families and youth in part acknowledged that the education of homeless youth has been continually represented in scant ways in the research literature. It is now estimated that approximately fifty thousand youth in the United States are homeless for six months or longer (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2011). Most typically, the homeless youth population has been represented as residing in the inner city with single-parent, female-headed families. Yet the “face” of homelessness has changed considerably in the past few years and continues to change. It is now estimated that fourteen out of every ten thousand people are “rural” or “suburban” homeless (as compared to twenty-nine out of every ten thousand people who are “urban” homeless) (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2011).
The community-based field experience depicted in this case study was initially conceived as part of a course I taught entitled “Teaching English in Middle/Secondary Schools.” In years prior to the fall implementation, I had included only “traditional” service learning field sites as options for preservice teachers’ completion of the field experience component of the course. However, I desired to broaden the field experience to purposely include a community-based site. I initially conceptualized the community-based field site as an “option” for interested students; however, over the course of the pilot year, I came to conceptualize community-based field experiences as part of the service learning framework for the course. During the first semester of the initiative, four preservice teachers (out of nineteen total preservice teachers enrolled in the course) volunteered to work with Family Partnership’s day center for homeless families throughout the fall and spring semesters of one academic year. At the time of the study, all four preservice teachers were in the process of becoming licensed teachers in the area of secondary English/language arts education at the University of Kansas.
Method
Ming Nguyen, Sarah Emerson, Tara Stance, and Rebecca Avery (pseudonyms) are the preservice teachers featured in the remainder of this case study. As these four prospective teachers embarked on their service learning experience, I sought to capture their perceptions concerning what the experience meant to the ways in which they conceptualized their future role as “teacher.”
As a method of data collection and organization, I viewed preservice teachers’ stories of “self” as opportunities to understand their service learning work at Family Partnership. On several occasions, in focus group interviews and seminar meetings, these four beginning teachers were purposefully prompted to focus on the “self” as a way to situate teacher identity as a gradual formation of “becoming” (Gomez, Black, & Allen, 2007). Throughout the remainder of this case study, preservice teachers’ stories of their work with homeless youth at Family Partnership are depicted as ways to understand the “becoming” of participants’ teacher identities, as well as possibilities for beginning teachers to articulate the value of service learning within the context of a community-based field site.
Preservice teachers’ stories of self were captured in multiple formats: in focus group interviews with the preservice teachers in both the fall and spring semesters and in monthly seminar meetings that were held throughout the study. Stories of self were also articulated in preservice teachers’ reflective journals (kept throughout the course of the year).
Themes Illuminated
Understanding the In-School/Out-of-School Connection
The beginning months of participation at Family Partnership prompted preservice teachers to focus on their perceptions of homelessness in the local community. In a seminar meeting held during the first month of the study, after preservice teachers had attended the two-hour volunteer training required by the Family Partnership program, beginning teachers were asked about their familiarity with the issue of homelessness in the local community.
I shared with the four preservice teachers that Barton (1998) writes that the issue of homelessness is often one that is “hidden” in schools and an issue that remains represented in scant ways in the research literature. Sarah, one of the prospective teachers, had been working during her first few weeks at Family Partnership with a middle-school-aged student named Cassie until Cassie and her family transitioned out of the Family Partnership program. Sarah reflected on her role with Cassie and also on what her knowledge of Cassie’s life meant for her future work as a classroom teacher. In a seminar meeting in October during the fall semester, Sarah said,
At first, I felt disappointed that I would no longer be working with Cassie in the Family Partnership program. However, I then reflected on the fact that this is the goal of the program: to transition families to permanent housing. I began to think about how my goal in teaching is not just to think of teaching as relevant to myself as “teacher” but also to what teaching means through the eyes of my students. This experience at Family Partnership really made me consider that.
Later in the fall, Sarah talked about service learning in community-based spaces as prompting her shift to focusing on both herself and her students rather than only herself as “teacher.” In her journal at the end of the fall semester, she wrote,
This experience has showed me in very real ways that students’ lives outside of school really do matter to what happens in school. So many times I found myself thinking about this connection. We read about this in our [teacher education] classes, but I don’t think I’ve ever considered it fully. Having an experience outside of a classroom allowed me to see this connection.
Resonating with Coffey’s (2010) view that community-based service learning experiences have the power to transform the ways that educators see the effects of schooling in their students’ lives, Sarah articulates how a service learning experience outside the more “traditional” classroom field site is beneficial for her as a future teacher. Similarly, Ming saw how situating students’ reading interests and abilities was not a simple split between in-school and out-of-school arenas. Ming worked extensively with Penny, a thirteen-year-old middle school student, over the course of the fall semester. Penny was adamant about reading “vampire” books, and Ming at first viewed such books as purely pleasure reading for Penny. Yet, over time, Ming reflected on how her view of Penny’s reading habits changed as she spent more time reading with Penny. Below is an excerpt from Ming’s journal:
Penny loves reading vampire books and I thought this was fine but saw it as outside of school reading. I thought that reading aloud a book like this was really only good for her fluency in reading. As we got more into the book, though, I could see how she was really imagining things about the story-world presented in the book. The book was a creative place for her mind, not just a fun book. This is what English teachers want books to do for kids and I am not so judgmental of these types of books anymore.
Ming was able to move from a conception of knowledge that is exclusively school based to one that inhabits both in-school and out-of-school spaces. Instead of dichotomizing reading choices into out-of-school and in-school books, Ming saw the value of Penny’s reading choices beyond these defined dichotomies.
Embracing Multiple Visions of the Role of “Teacher”
Preservice teachers sought experiences that would lead them to inhabit a “teacher” role, and the role that they assumed at Family Partnership, in their minds, first resembled a “tutoring” role. Challenging the ways in which service learning within the context of a community-based field site was situated as “other than traditional” field experience in teacher education sought to break the binary of teacher/tutor. The teacher/tutor dichotomy stood strong in the preservice teachers’ minds at the beginning of their work in Family Partnership. Challenging this dichotomy was one step in legitimizing the work that the four prospective teachers undertook at Family Partnership. To illustrate the significance of this theme, excerpts from Rebecca’s and Tara’s journals written early in the fall semester showed that, although they viewed their work at Family Partnership as meaningful, they continued to question the “direct relevance” their work in community-based sites had to their work as future classroom teachers. Rebecca wrote,
When working with Jason [an adolescent at Family Partnership], I’ve been able to ask him about what he is good at and how this matches up with what he studies at school. There seems to be a space for me to interact with him and a way to use his strengths to help him with school knowledge. I don’t know if I could do this in the classroom.
Similarly, Tara expressed concerns that her work was more “mentoring” than “teaching.” She wrote, “I think all kids need mentors just as they need teachers. I feel like I am contributing to this mentorship of adolescents when I’m at Family Partnership.”
During a seminar meeting in the spring semester, Tara and Rebecca both stated that observing manifestations of teaching English in “unofficial” school spaces, such as Family Partnership, had indeed assisted them in viewing the teaching of English as a complex negotiation of multiple systems at play (Lave & Wegner, 1991). This was a shift from prior articulations in the fall semester. Tara said,
When I started at Family Partnership in the fall, I didn’t see the work we did as teaching. I saw it more as mentoring. I’ve been a Big Sister through the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program, so I wasn’t really sure I needed to get better at mentoring. I thought that I was already good at it. I see now that the more experience you have building relationships with students, the better you get at teaching. Teaching English is not just teaching about literature or poetry or something, but about interacting with students about something.
Interacting with students, and practicing empathy and development of positive relationships between teacher and students, is at the heart of prosocial education. Through this service learning experience, teachers like Tara were able to legitimize interpersonal work between teacher and students as “teaching.”
Rebecca also followed this thought in one of the focus group interviews, stating,
Honestly, I was skeptical that my actual skills as a teacher would be built in a place like Family Partnership, but I think it helped me actually expand what I thought about teaching. I think it was good for me to do service learning outside of the formal classroom.
Over time, both Rebecca and Tara saw how service learning in a “nonschool” space helped them better understand the connection between “in-school” and “out-of-school,” as well as how they connected to their future role as “teacher.”
Implications and Conclusions
Ming, Sarah, Tara, and Rebecca used the stories they told about their work at Family Partnership to process how they viewed both who they were as future teachers and what the work of teaching would entail. They also reflected on what they believed about the students with whom they worked, about homeless youth, and about who these youth were and what possibilities existed for them. Over the course of one academic year, they used their stories from their work at a community-based field site to imagine their future work as teachers and to deconstruct binary notions of school/community and teacher/student. Through their service learning work, preservice teachers were able to understand how limited these binaries were, in that they restricted teachers’ and students’ roles in and out of the classroom. The experience at Family Partnership allowed for an expanded view of what constitutes teaching; teaching in these preservice teachers’ minds now included the possibility of fostering relationships between teachers and students.
Preservice teachers’ service learning work in community-based field sites has tremendous potential to encourage teacher candidates to learn about their students’ capabilities, strengths, and interests (Sleeter, 2008) early in teacher education programs. Most convincingly, work in community-based field sites encourages prospective teachers to deconstruct the assumed binaries of school/community, self/other, and teacher/student that so frequently limit beginning teachers’ conceptualizations of teaching and learning. As a feature of teacher education programs, service learning in community-based field sites has the potential to work toward prompting preservice teachers to question and reenvision their future work as classroom teachers.
References
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Coffey, H. (2010). “They taught me”: The benefits of early community-based field experiences in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(2), 335–342.
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Family Promise. (2011a). Home page. Retrieved September 5, 2011, from http://www.familypromise.org
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*This study was funded by grants from the Conference on English Education (a constituent group of the National Council of Teachers of English) and the University of Kansas School of Education Research Support Program.