This personal narrative 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 friends— colleagues, family members, and friends—who 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)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:USF/oai:scholarcommons.usf.edu:etd-7968 |
| Date | 27 March 2017 |
| Creators | Verdi, Kristy Causey |
| Publisher | Scholar Commons |
| Source Sets | University of South Flordia |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Graduate Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | default |
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