Conner, J. O. (2010). Learning to unlearn: How a service-learning project can help teacher candidates to reframe urban students. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 1170-1177.
Introduction
Methods
Results
Discussion and Conclusion
“Like the prospective teacher quoted above, many American preservice educators have had little personal experience with urban youth or youth whose backgrounds differ from their own prior to entering the classroom full-time” (Connor, 2010, p. 1170).
“Limited experience with diverse school settings and students causes some prospective educators to “enter teacher education believing that cultural diversity is a problem to overcome and that students of color are deficient in some fundamental way” (Villegas, 2007, p. 374)” (Connor, 2010, p. 1170).
“Their understandings of urban, low-income, minority youth derive largely from media depictions and common social stereotypes” (Connor, 2010, p. 1170).
“Two theoretical lenses focus this study” (Connor, 2010, p. 1171).
“Contact theory, introduced by Gordon Allport (1954) in The Nature of Prejudice, identifies five conditions necessary for attitude change. These conditions include 1) equal-status contact; 2) the pursuit of common goals; 3) intergroup cooperation; 4) support of authorities, custom or law; and 5) long-term contact” (Connor, 2010, p. 1171).
“This study also draws on the theory of unlearning, coined by Herbert Kohl (1994) in his seminal essay “I Won't Learn from You.”” (Connor, 2010, p. 1171).
“The service-learning experience that this study investigates was embedded in a course called Diversity and Inclusion. Diversity and Inclusion is a required course for all education majors at Villanova University, a mid-sized university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States” (Connor, 2010, p. 1171).
“Twenty-one prospective educators from Villanova signed consent forms, agreeing to participate in the study... The participants included six males, one of whom self-identified as Asian. The remaining males and 14 of the 15 females identified as white; the other female identified as Hispanic. All participants were secondary education majors and none had commenced student teaching” (Connor, 2010, p. 1172).
“This study draws on both qualitative and quantitative data to achieve what Collins, Onwuegbuzie, and Sutton (2006) call “significance enhancement,” that is, to maximize interpretations and understanding of the phenomenon of interest” (Connor, 2010, p. 1172).
“Each week, students in the course traveled 10.5 miles, leaving behind their lush suburban campus to enter a dilapidated, distressed section of Philadelphia, home to Sun Valley High School.1 At Sun Valley, the prospective teachers worked one-on-one with a 12th grade student, who had been assigned to him or her for the semester” (Connor, 2010, p. 1171).
“The quantitative data were analyzed to determine whether participants' responses shifted in a statistically meaningful way over the course of the semester” (Connor, 2010, p. 1173).
“At Sun Valley and other high schools in the Philadelphia School District, the senior project includes four components: a 10 page research paper; 15 h of field work connected to the selected topic; a formal oral presentation delivered in front of a panel of adult judges; and a portfolio demonstrating the “learning journey” (RMC, 2008, p. 1)” (Connor, 2010, p. 1172).
“In addition to helping their partners to complete the research paper piece of the senior project, the Villanova teacher candidates were also expected to learn from the high school students with whom they worked and to draw connections between what they were experiencing at Sun Valley and the course readings and lectures. They depended on the high school students to help them complete three major course assignments, each of which was designed to help them to learn how to learn about students, about teaching, or about themselves” (Connor, 2010, p. 1172).
“Qualitative data came from the informal and formal reflections students produced for class. In addition, approximately one-third (7) of the prospective educators participated in a semi-structured interview” (Connor, 2010, p. 1172).
“Participants also completed anonymous baseline and end-of course surveys” (Connor, 2010, p. 1172).
“I then turned to the qualitative data to illuminate the nature of the changes in prospective teachers' attitudes and beliefs about students, urban youth, and urban schools” (Connor, 2010, p. 1173).
“The findings indicate that the prospective educators' views of high school students improved over the course of the semester” (Connor, 2010, p. 1173).
“The prospective educators' views of urban students also became more positive” (Connor, 2010, p. 1173).
“Finally, the number of prospective educators who had rated themselves as “not at all likely” to teach in an urban school fell from five at the start of the course to zero by the end of the course, while the number who rated themselves as “very likely” to teach in an urban school doubled from three to six” (Connor, 2010, p. 1173).
“In addition to providing them with insight into the Sun Valley students' backgrounds and daily lives, the conversations the prospective teachers had with their learning partners allowed them to see the intelligence and intellectual capacity of their learning partners, and this recognition sparked processes of unlearning for several of the participants” (Connor, 2010, p. 1174).
“Several of the prospective teachers explained that “the being there and interacting with the students” (IVLE, 3-11-09, p. 5) helped to shift their perceptions of urban youth. As one said, “Just being able to actually interact with them and seeing their intelligence and what they bring to the table- that is what helped me” (IVIT, 3-19-09, p. 4)” (Connor, 2010, p. 1174).
“The majority of the Sun Valley students who participated in the service-learning project with the prospective teachers lived in the neighborhood surrounding their school, where they grew up in extreme poverty” (Connor, 2010, p. 1173).
“In addition to being in the site, sharing observations and emotional reactions with peers during van rides back to campus and in class helped to further the process of attitudinal change among the prospective teachers” (Connor, 2010, p. 1175).
“As the prospective teachers learned about “how many obstacles there are for these students” (CRLN, 12-2-08, p. 1), they came to a “better understanding of the harsh realities” (FEBN, 5-6-09, p. 8) of urban life for poor, minority youth” (Connor, 2010, p. 1173).
“For several prospective teachers, the ultimate lesson they extracted from this experience was, as one put it, “The teacher needs to listen to the student just as much as the student needs to listen to the teacher” (FECN, 5-5-09, p. 7) because the students are valuable sources of knowledge” (Connor, 2010, p. 1174).
“Many of the pre-service teachers offered examples of their growing self-awareness, demonstrating how the service-learning experience had taught them to attend to and monitor their judgments and assumptions” (Connor, 2010, p. 1175).
Discussion
Conclusion
“My analysis revealed statistically significant and qualitatively meaningful shifts in the prospective teachers' views of high school students, particularly urban youth” (Connor, 2010, p. 1175).
“The results presented in this article highlight the value of using student voice to disrupt status norms within service learning” (Connor, 2010, p. 1175).
“The process of learning to listen to students at the preservice stage can thereby help prospective educators to uncover their assumptions about and stereotypes of students (Cook-Sather, 2002)” (Connor, 2010, p. 1175).
“This research raises important implications for teacher training. Teacher education programs must help prospective teachers to learn how to learn about as well as from students and communities” (Connor, 2010, p. 1176).
“My study suggests that service learning can sew the seeds of transformation among prospective educators when sustained direct experience is both complemented by student voice work that interrupts traditional status hierarchies and undergirded by structured reflection; however, I temper my claims by noting that I certainly have not investigated the longer-term implications of the service-learning experience on the attitudes and beliefs the preservice teachers enact once ensconced in their own classrooms” (Connor, 2010, p. 1176).
“When prospective educators come to such understandings, we advance one step further in the quest to achieve social justice in our schools and society” (Connor, 2010, p. 1176).