“They Look Scared”: Moving From Service Learning to Learning to Serve in Teacher Education—A Social Justice Perspective

This article investigates three teacher learners’ service learning experiences, in order to explore the extent to which approaches to service learning can lead to legitimate learning outcomes tied to transformative teacher growth and situated in tenets of social justice. Using student interview data, the author posits that service learning fails as a social justice methodology for preparing teachers when it fails to interrupt biases in ways that transform teacher learners into learning servants. The findings suggest that in order to prepare educators to serve, more work needs to happen prior to sending teacher learners into the field, as some of the biases we wish to interrupt may be firmly in place before these new teachers enter the field. The article concludes by reframing service learning through the conceptual methodology of learning to serve.