The Student as Teacher Educator in Service-Learning

To prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to work with diverse populations of PreK-12 students, teacher educators are incorporating a variety of field-based experiences into teacher preparation. Service-learning courses can provide PSTs with additional field experiences beyond formal student teaching. This study is concerned with the experiences of a group of undergraduate PSTs as they tutor in an alternative school as part of a service-learning course. To make sense of their experiences at the alternative school, these PSTs compared their own PreK-12 experiences and those of the students they tutored. In this study, the students at the alternative school served as the most influential contributors to PSTs’ developing conceptions of teaching and of schools—a finding that has implications for teacher preparation.