By adopting a critical social justice framework in the course readings, curricular mate-rials, and assignments, the professor afforded students engaged in this service-learning experience the ability to engage with a range of diversity concepts in a manner that foregrounded issues of oppression, power, and privilege. Results from student interviews
revealed ample evidence of the strength of using a cultural humility approach—as con-trasted to a cultural competency model—of engagement with child and youth participants in community settings. As noted above, numerous social justice teacher educators have documented their struggles with addressing critical issues with pre-service teachers, and this approach is offered as a possible model. It allows for opportunities for research-in-formed critical self-reflection embedded in the context of weekly experiences in com-munity programs where they can build positive relationships with children of diverse identities.
Specific illustrations indicate ways pre-service teachers express their learning from justice-based service-learning experiences. For example, their accounts point to the importance of a cultural humility approach to foster openness to a wide range of moti-vations, life experiences, and understandings of diversity. Likewise, social justice-based approaches improve pre-service teachers’ ability to identify and appreciate the many strengths of children and youth from immigrant families. In sum, the pre-service teachers we interviewed who had participated in one of the two iterations of this program offered evidence of an increased sense of cultural humility, and understanding of the teacher’s pivotal role in creating more equitable learning experiences for all children and youth, including those from immigrant families.
This program aided our goal, as Darling-Hammond (2002) expressed it, to “em-power teachers to define for themselves what it means to be personally affected by social issues involving equity and diversity, as well as what it means to become efficacious in their teaching for social change” (p. 7). Findings from this study strongly suggest that professional education faculties can strengthen their service-learning experiences by es-chewing deficit-model thinking and cultural safari approaches, and increasing their focus on fostering critical engagement and reflection on social justice issues. Inevitably there exist many structural barriers within faculties of education in implementing such collab-orative community-driven programs with a focus on social justice. Limitations in re-sources, ideological resistance to acknowledging and addressing notions of privilege and oppression, specific faculty expertise and experience, and broader concerns about system-ic structures of oppression and resistance remain. However, we hope this brief account of some of the successes of this program will help guide and encourage the design of other innovative approaches to professional education.
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