Art Student Perceptions of the Role of Community Service in Israeli Teacher Education

The purpose of this research was to understand how student art teachers perceive the contribution to their training of community service in various frameworks, such as a prison and a drug rehabilitation center. The research was conducted in 2006-2007 in the School of Art at Beit Berl College, Israel, in two stages. In the first stage, six open-ended interviews were held with students who had taken part in community service, transcriptions of which were subjected to content analysis, yielding four main themes, each comprised of several items. These items were later formulated into a questionnaire, which was administered in the second stage to 120 students of the college. The questionnaire results demonstrate that students felt that community service had contributed meaningfully to their training as art teachers and also helped them to define and develop their emotional world, but the respondents were divided regarding the contributions of community service to their creative work as artists.