Abstracts Category : Other

What Does It Mean to Be a Service-Learning Teacher? - An Autoethnography

by Kristy C Verdi

This autoethnography of my lived experiences as a middle-school service-learning course teacher has helped me solve a personal mystery and present an important perspective for the K-12 service-learning field. With an eye on revealing a unique service-learning classroom concept to educational leaders, enhancing middle level teacher education, and hopes of providing greater opportunities for advancing research on service learning in K-12 education, this study has also aided me in understanding my professional self and my subjective educational theory through a personal interpretive framework (Kelchtermans, 1993, 1999, 2009). Using autoethnography (Ellis, 2004; Ellis & Bochner, 2006) as a method to explore my own experiences as a middle school service-learning teacher and the perceptions of critical friendscolleagues, family members, and friendswho have been significant in my experiences, I am able to present an evocative personal narrative on what it means to be a service-learning teacher. Overarching findings from this study reveal that a middle grades service-learning teacher is a self-authored individual (Baxter Magolda, 1999, 2009; Kegan, 1994) who is committed to community-engaged education (Dewey, 1900, 1933), possesses a strong I must (Noddings, 2002b, p. 20) perspective on relational care, and are for development in servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977; Sergiovanni, 1992; Bowman, 2005)