Angela Hill

Potential of Service-Learning to Promote Sustainability Competencies in Pre-Service Teachers: A Case Study.

This research investigates the potential of service-learning to develop a situated, embodied and critically reflective human agency for sustainability. It employs document analysis to review the intended curriculum and the institutional contexts of national and international cases wherein service-learning is a component of pre-service teacher education. Exploration of intended learning outcomes and project and assessment experiences across three cases reveal the potential of service-learning to develop in pre-service teachers sustainability competencies involving participative action with community partners to achieve agreed-upon outcomes, as well as critically reflective capacities and understanding of how, in their future classrooms, schools and communities, they can serve as adaptive, lifelong learners and agents for social and environmental change. Findings also suggest that explicitly linking service-learning activities, guided by social justice and equity principles, with a (social) sustainability agenda may further validate the utilisation of and investment in service-learning and civic engagement in teacher and higher education settings.

The Critical Global Citizen

Policy imperatives around mobility encourage students to take up international experiences to increase their marketability. These imperatives are framed in narrow ways by neoliberal metanarratives of globalization. As a result, peripheral mobility experiences are often positioned as key to internationalization and developing global citizenship. This individualized notion of the global citizen is counter to qualities of critical global citizenship, such as resilience, empathy, understanding one’s place in the world, and an ethical understanding of inequalities. Higher education institutions have an important role in shaping the social and disciplinary norms that construct these notions and in recognizing the diversity of local and international experiences that perpetuate them. This chapter puts forward a challenge to institutions to create supportive environments for the facilitation of critical global citizenship.