APPROACHES TO INTEGRATING COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, AND PEDAGOGY: PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ INSIGHTS FROM FIELD EXPERIENCE

Learn and Serve Niagara defines service learning as “an active learning experience” that brings together faculty, students and community citizens. Its vision of excellence in promoting service for the poor and the marginalized through curricular connections helps prepare students for service and reflect on it. The goals and objectives of learn and serve include fostering good citizenship, strengthening academic skills, and enhancing awareness of diversity and multiculturalism (http://www.niagara.edu/service-learning). This is an excellent opportunity for pre-service teachers at Niagara University, to grow professionally as they observe, assist and seize it to practice teaching in a real classroom setting. In the instructor’s courses this is achieved through an assignment composed of an up-to-date journal on learn and serve and an essay entitled “community, diversity, pedagogy.” The assignment requires the candidates to identify specific instructional and assessment strategies conducive to building a community of learners which is locally connected and aware of critical and global issues. This paper is an analysis of pre-service teachers’ perspectives on observed strategies that appear to integrate community, diversity and pedagogy. Data consist of assignments gathered over two semesters of service learning experience including fall 2009 and spring 2010. Candidates were placed in various and diverse districts including, high needs, rural, suburban and inner city schools. There were 62 students who constituted two secondary cohorts. Their perspectives of the classroom teacher’s practice range from highly responsive, creative, beneficial and integrative of community, diversity, and pedagogy to, not observed. Various dimensions of pedagogy are observed and reflected upon, including the seating arrangement, the teacher’s rules and expectations, accommodations, motivation techniques, instructional and assessment methods as well as approaches to involving families and community and developing a sense of global citizenship in students. An effective, inclusive and transformative practice in increasingly diverse classroom settings requires teachers’ deep understanding of the links between their educational philosophy, dispositions and classroom pedagogy. It is not enough to believe in multiculturalism, one must actively and relevantly integrate it to optimize all students’ learning and help them achieve academic success.