Fostering Cultural Humility among Pre-Service Teachers: Connecting with Children and Youth of Immigrant Families through Service-Learning

Abstract

This article documents a community-initiated service-learning project within a teacher education program. A social justice model guided the initiative to raise critical awareness on power and privilege while countering deficit-model thinking. Partnering with community agencies serving immigrant children and youth, the faculty researcher worked with an office for community-engaged learning. Data included pre-and post-experience interviews with pre-service candidates. Findings showed benefits from this justice-based approach in improving self-awareness, appreciating the strengths of immigrant children and youth, and an increased sense of cultural humility in pre-service teachers.

Unlearning Colonial Identities While Engaging in Relationality: Settler Teachers’ Education-as-Reconciliation

“…complacent regarding the need to teach in a responsive, relational way with Indigenous students, different than for "all my [mainstream] students." In addition, TCs would present as over-confident subject-expert teachers with little lived cultural humility (Lund & Lee, 2015) saying things such as, "I took this Native Studies or Ojibwe language course in university, so, I have enough credits to teach this subject so I think I could take that job..." For many of these overtly confident or instrumental TCs, their response to assuming a decolonizing identity as a teacher of Indigenous students became stickier or more conflicted as they realized their outsider positionality and rare experience in relating to Indigenous peoples: We were aware that the IPPE course could be used as an instrumental means for some settler-teachers to gain an economic advantage in the glutted teacher market of Ontario schools. This slippery slope of giving settler TCs a specialized, value-added course could become the TCs' advantage in an increasingly competitive field, especially when school boards have not explicitly reserved Indigenous education or subject positions for FNMI teachers.…”

“…We designed focal point assignments that would immerse the settler TCs in: 1) cultural experiences in Indigenous community settings or Indigenous dominant spaces for learning (settler) cultural humility (Lund & Lee, 2015),…”

The Social Justice Turn: Cultivating “Critical Hope” in an Age of Despair

“…As Einfeld and Collins (2008) illustrate through their research with an AmeriCorps service-learning program, the exposure to inequality and the development of relationships with marginalized or underprivileged communities does not necessarily lead students to a desire for social change. Many of the scholarly voices deeply critical of service-learning, however, are the same ones that point to its potential as a highly effective, emotional, and transformational pedagogy that serves community needs while also teaching students about diversity, power and privilege, social justice, responsibility, civic mindedness, global citizenship, and more (e.g., Catlett & Proweller, 2016;Cipolle, 2010;Grusky, 2000;Hartman & Kiely, 2014;Kiely, 2004;Kraft & Dwyer, 2000;Lund, Bragg, Kaipainen, & Lee, 2014;Lund & Lee, 2015;Schensul & Berg, 2004;Sharpe & Dear, 2013). Herein lies the greatest dilemma within the field of service-learning: It has the capacity to exacerbate inequality when done poorly, and to be a promising equalizing force when done well.…”

“…Further, it includes a 5-year ongoing research component that includes pre-and postsemester interviews as well as classroom and field observations. This has resulted in a robust data set that offers rich insights into reciprocal community engagement, fostering cultural humility, and critical teacher education for social justice (e.g., Lee & Lund, 2016;Lund & Lee, 2015).…”

Beyond Superheroes and Sidekicks: Empowerment, Efficacy, and Education in Community Partnerships

“…Humility -an intentional acknowledgement of one's modest, humble role in the larger world -serves as the essential currency of respectful, meaningful partnerships as it inherently places the emphasis on the greater good rather than on personal ego. Cultivating humility can lead to better outcomes for community organizations and students alike, while preparing students to be humble, effective practitioners (Lund & Lee, 2015). Humility is also a necessary element of adopting a more democratic form of SLCE and thereby honoring power sharing, asset recognition, and a shared sense of responsibility to one another for successful and ethical community partnerships.…”