Negotiating Pedagogy Development: Learning to Teach Writing in a Service-Learning Context

Research has called for courses to be developed that provide preservice teachers opportunities to actively engage their pedagogies under construction in order to effectively translate their beliefs into sound instructional practice. This article presents research that examined how a service-learning writing tutoring program affected preservice teachers' pedagogy of writing instruction. Students enrolled in the course Teaching Writing in Elementary School spent an hour each week during a semester at a local community center working as writing tutors with elementary students. The service-learning experience represented a “third space” of interaction, where course requirements and children's needs converged. The preservice teachers experienced pedagogical dissonance as they experienced tension in “working the hyphen” between the service and the learning. A negotiation model emerged from the preservice teachers' experiences, which this article shares and explains through the description of three preservice teachers' experiences. Learning how to negotiate this tension may provide preservice teachers with the skills to work as third-space practitioners when faced with similar challenges as future educators.