Community Service Learning: An Ethical Proposal for Teacher Education

ervice learning is a pedagogical model for educating students at schools or universities in different dimensions: cognitive, ethical, civic, democratic. This model, very common in the USA, is not well known in Europe. At Verona University (Mortari, 2017), in Italy, the Center of educational and didactic research proposed the Service Learning model to pre-service teachers education. To avoid using a training model where students simply “apply” academic learning within the class and where schools are considered only as passive locations, students are engaged as service teacher collaborators and educational researchers. This Community Service Learning project offered pre-service teachers multiple educational directions, not simply theoretical and instrumental learning, and provided them opportunities to: face the complexity of school- life; be the apprentice of in-service teachers; orient teacher education toward an ethical approach; and educate teachers as researchers. All these directions are core competence requirements as indicated by the European Commission (2013, 2014). Following this vision, our department chose to pay attention to schools where the complexity of social and educational contexts was growing. This paper will present this educational path, starting from the theoretical framework nurtured by an ethical and political vision of education, and moving toward its practical and organizational aspects.