Learning to Unlearn: How a Service-Learning Project Can Help Teacher Candidates to Reframe Urban Students

This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol 26, Issue 5, Author(s): Jerusha O. Conner, “Learning to Unlearn: How a Service-Learning Project Can Help Teacher Candidates to Reframe Urban Students”, Pages 1170-1177, Copyright Elsevier (July 2010).

Teachers' views and expectations of students directly impact student learning, and unless they are challenged during the preparation period, these views are unlikely to change.

This study explored how a group of prospective teachers explained the shift in their perspectives of low-income, urban youth as a result of participating in a service-learning project that explicitly attended to issues of status and processes of unlearning.

The findings indicate that when fused with student voice work, service learning can help prospective teachers to uncover, examine, and revise their assumptions about students, particularly those whose backgrounds differ from their own.