Discourse of Advocacy: Student Learners' Critical Reflections on Working with Spanish-Speaking Immigrant Students

 This chapter examines the critical reflections of college students who volunteered to tutor Spanish-speaking immigrant children in a service-learning project. The authors conducted individual interviews to gain the service-learning experiences of four college students and used discourse analysis to analyze the data. Based on Freirean praxis and Bourdieuian capital theory, their study identifies critical and uncritical patterns of reflections of these participants in response to their service-learning experiences. The findings suggest that critical reflections of service learners relate social problems of immigrant students within inequitable social structures, whereas uncritical reflections focus on the deficit view of disenfranchised communities. The authors conclude that in order to promote social justice for immigrant children, teacher-training programs could promote service-learners' transformation through the way they report the challenges.