Promise and Challenge of Service-Learning Portraiture Research, (The)

This chapter begins by describing the general conceptual framework used in four portraiture projects. Examples are drawn from three Service-Learning 2000 projects to illustrate the framework in action. More attention is focused on the teacher education project because it departed from the Lightfoot-Davis model by asking professors to write about their own work. Faculty members serve not as outside researchers but as key actors in the projects. These professors were, in many respects, portraiture pioneers who tested the possibility that action research could be successfully adapted for portraiture. In addition, they experimented with the value of forming a collegial learning community connecting six teacher education institutions across the state of California. The chapter concludes by describing a fourth portraiture effort centered in South Carolina. Although participants in the South Carolina project received training in the Lightfoot-Davis model, they further adapted the model to serve their unique purposes. [authors]