Expanding Elementary Teacher Education through Service-Learning: A Handbook on Extending Literacy Field Experience for 21st Century Urban Teacher Prep [Paperback]

Teacher education programs and colleges of education face a multilayered task of preparing teachers to teach in increasingly divergent environments where children of color encompass a significant number of urban school populations. Yet the teaching force remains predominantly white, middle-income, monolingual, and female. Compounding this complex issue, the racial and the socio-economic makeup of many teacher education faculty mirrors the teacher candidate population.

The goal of this handbook is to offer teacher educators a blue print for strengthening and extending traditional literacy field experiences to include service-learning components. As literacy teacher educators, Sulentic Dowell and Meidl demonstrate how teacher education can be transformed to include more authentic, meaningful, and preparatory field experiences. Adding service-learning components expands teacher education to more adequately prepare elementary education candidates to meet childrens needs in 21st century, urban elementary classrooms. This handbook considers the need to redefine and reconfigure teacher education in regards to literacy teaching and learning.

Margaret-Mary Sulentic Dowell, Ph.D. is a professor of literacy and urban education at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, where she also serves as director of the LSU Writing Project and coordinator of the Elementary Grades 1-5 Teacher Education Program. Sulentic Dowell'sresearch agenda is focused on literacy in urban settings, specifically the complexities of literacy leadership, providing access to literature, writing, and the arts, and service-learning as a pathway to preparing pre-service teachers to teach literacy authentically in urban environs. She was editor of the Literacy and Social Responsibility ejournal from 2009-2014. Sulentic Dowell spent 15 years as an educator in the Waterloo, Iowa Community Schools and was a service-learning faculty fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg. Slƒ5