Chapter 3: Service Learning as an Essential Component of Teacher Preparation for English Language Learners

The purpose of this chapter is to provide recommendations to teacher educators in terms of structuring service-learning experiences in ways that promote beliefs and help preservice teachers develop the skills necessary to be effective with English language learners (ELLs). Teacher education is at a crucial juncture as the demographic makeup of current students is changing rapidly, resulting in a need to reexamine teacher education in light of these shifts (Capps et al., 2005; National Center for Education Statistics, 2013; Zumwalt & Craig, 2005). For example, the percentage of minority students in K–12 public schools increased from 33% in 1990 to 46% in 2010, whereas only 16.5% of teachers reported belonging to minority groups in 2007–2008 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013), and most do not have the experience of becoming proficient in a second lan- guage (Zehler et al., 2003), the kind of experience that may help them relate to the learning histories of their students. This disparity raises concern about the limited abilities of those with monocultural and monolingual experiences when they view and value the perspectives of their students from other cultural backgrounds (Hyun, 1997). Additionally, many preservice teachers believe they are not as capable of instructing students who differ from themselves in terms of race (Barry & Lechner, 1995; Pang, & Sablan, 1998; Siwatu, 2007) or language (Gandara, Maxwell-Jolly, & Driscoll, 2005; Lucas, Villegas & Freedson-Gonzalez, 2008; Yough, 2010) as they do those from their own cultural backgrounds.