Chapter 8: Walking the Walk and Showing How: University Students Learning to Lead Through Service

This research traces outcomes of a service-learning experience in which student volunteers from a historic black university engage after school twice weekly, 2 hours each session, as tutors for third to fifth graders from urban impact schools in Greensboro, North Carolina. Bounded only by as many semesters as students choose to participate—and many return term after term—this supported engagement provides them with ongoing opportunities to actualize the cultural strengths and dispositions they bring with them to the university as they develop into culturally competent practitioners, members of a professional learning community, and leaders. In this project university tutors learn to teach and lead through service, and employ service-learning as a pedagogy of promise with children. Children have opportunities to catch up academically, and university students take up the stance of African American teacher leader: they embody expertise about teaching black and other global majority children (Robinson, 2011; Ball, 2009). Our chapter explores these outcomes and contributes to the ongoing dialogue on service-learning as a form of leader development.