Abstract
When prospective teachers enter a teacher education program, they do so with embodied personal practical knowledge (Connelly, Clandinin DJ, Teachers as curriculum planners: narratives of experience. Teachers College Press, New York, 1988), storied knowledge that is shaped by their experience. Deeply rooted and often unconscious, this knowledge may resist even the most well-intentioned, classroom-based attempts to graft onto it theoretical notions of diversity. Grounded in a narrative understanding of teacher knowledge, this chapter draws from a narrative inquiry in which the author used service-learning sites as contextual spaces to inquire, with four preservice teachers, into their shifting understandings of who they were in relation with children of diversity. One participant’s story is highlighted to illustrate how personal practical knowledge of diversity is shaped by early family and school experiences and can be shifted as a result of being dispositioned (Vinz, Composing a teaching life. Boyton/Cook, Portsmouth, 1996) in unexpected ways through a service-learning engagement structured for relational inquiry into the experience.
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Notes
- 1.
As interim texts, I drafted borderland sketches in an attempt to capture the moments when each participant’s stories to live by rubbed up against the children’s and caused them to reflect on themselves in relation to others. I used their own words to reflect these moments of reconstructing meaning.
- 2.
Dewey (1938) believed that a miseducative experience stymied the growth of further experiences. In other words, miseducative experiences discouraged students from wanting to pursue further experiences.
- 3.
Culture, when studied on a theoretical level, can be experienced as abstractions. Cultural groups, for example, might be grouped into categories and taught in terms of generalities thereby denying complexities and differences inherent in the lives of people these categories portend to represent. Some of the multicultural education literature suggests that educators and theorists are increasingly turning towards personal narratives (Cochran-Smith 2000; Florio-Ruane and DeTar 2001; Paley 1995) and biography (Boyle-Baise 2002) to address the complexities of teaching for diversity. It is for this reason that I chose a more personal approach, one that recognizes that in order to think about a topic critically, it helps to be “touched emotionally by it” (Florio-Ruane and DeTar 2001, p. 7).
- 4.
- 5.
I learned of two youth clubs that were seeking volunteers and approached the respective directors to explain my study and offer our help as volunteers. We negotiated the nature, frequency and length of time of our presence as volunteers in the clubs. Two participants and I would spend one afternoon/evening per week in each club for a period of 13 weeks, which was the duration of our university term.
- 6.
In situating this study in an after-school youth club, my goal, while maintaining a volunteering component, was to shape a relationship between participants and children that would not be mediated or shaped by school. In the absence of bells and books and with the option to ‘drop-in’, the youth clubs were familiar environments to the children but unfamiliar to my participants and me. We had to work hard to connect with the children from week to week, noticing and paying attention to them as individuals in the context of their lives outside of school. With a view to having my participants make sense of their experiences in a relational way both on and off-site, participants were placed in pairs for their service-learning engagement.
- 7.
As a result of confidentiality, my participants and I did not have access to information about Willie or his family.
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Desrochers, C. (2017). Shaping Service-Learning Spaces for Preservice Teachers to Experience and Learn to Teach for Diversity. In: Heider, K. (eds) Service Learning as Pedagogy in Early Childhood Education. Educating the Young Child, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42430-9_5
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