Helping Teacher Candidates Develop a Critical Perspective in a Foundations Course: A Freirian Look at How Teacher Candidates Interpret Their Service-Learning Experience

Utilizing the literature on critical service-learning and Freire's construct of conscientization, the authors developed specific goals for the service experience embedded in the Foundations of American Education course. These critical service-learning goals state that teacher candidates will: (a) critically reflect on how their backgrounds as people with unearned privileges (SES, ethnicity, first language) affected their success in schools, (b) participate in educational dialogues with students marginalized by their ethnicity, first language, or SES to help codify education issues raised in the course content, and (c) increase their experiences with students marginalized by their ethnicity, first language, or SES. This study examines whether they attained these goals. [authors]