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<p>This article reports on students’ experiences of learning to work together in a childhood teacher education programme at a university in South Africa. We were interested in how students from diverse backgrounds, with little shared understanding of a model or framework for collaborative working, would find their footing and learn how to operationalise care, accountability and reflexivity through engaging in group work as part of their service learning activities. A cross section of student data, from first year to third year, was analysed using qualitative methods of data analysis. The main findings were that the incremental integration of service learning, with fixed student groupings over three years, was a catalyst for the gradual formation of professional student learning communities. The student struggles with group relationships helped them address their cultural, linguistic and gendered assumptions about each other. Lastly, we found that relatively fixed nature of the student groupings over a three year period encouraged deep reflection about ideas of care, community and social responsibility.</p>

This paper reports on the implementation of a model that infuses service-learning into a four-year foundation phase teacher education programme. We argue for an integrated curriculum design utilising specifically the teaching (laboratory) school of the faculty, not only for clinical experience or work-integrated learning, but also for service-learning. In this way, the relation of the teacher education programme to the teaching school and its location within Soweto, an area within Johannesburg, optimises the affordances of learning from and through experience for students. The service-learning activities were designed to inform and draw on students’ practical and situational learning (learning in and about context) and address the notions of integrated and applied knowledge in the ‘Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications’ (RSA DHET 2011). We argue in this paper that the incremental inclusion of service-learning over a four-year period and the varied nature of the service-learning projects within the programme extend students’ learning from practice, provide opportunities for students to see people outside of formal education as ‘experts’ who have something to contribute to their education, and maximize the potential civic and academic outcomes for students.