Multilateral Partnerships Supporting Community Engagement Among Pre-Service Teachers: The TELLUS Partnership

Multilateral partnerships for Experiential Learning draw together not only schools and universities in bilateral cooperations, but also invite community providers as additional partners to ground teaching and learning in the exigencies and affordances of a local community. In these multilateral partnerships between schools, universities, and community partners, the intersecting needs and priorities may vary greatly and necessitate trust, critical reflection, and flexibility among partners. The present chapter details how community partners, universities, and schools can collaborate on an equal footing to address the hardships of at-risk youth in German secondary education. In the chapter, eight lessons are drawn from the TELLUS team project (Team L ehrende, Lernende und Studierende, which translates to a team of educators, learners, and university students). This team is nested at the heart of a multilateral partnership between a civic foundation with its community partners, the partner schools, and the partner universities. The eight lessons from the partnership are explained to show how interorganizational, interdisciplinary teams uniting psychologists, social workers, and school teachers with pre-service teachers and students of psychology, educational sciences, social work, and economic pedagogy can offer valuable community services among vulnerable youth through Service Learning.