This study examines how program interns participating in the Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools---a national-community collaborative program for under-resourced communities---learned to teach through their participation in a national training institute and activities and learning opportunities at their local site. College-aged young adults known as "servant-leader interns" are the teachers in this context. At the national training and throughout the Freedom School program at their local sites interns are a part of various training and learning opportunities centered on engaging their students in the Freedom Schools curriculum. Such opportunities include curriculum training sessions, child development workshops, and daily site debriefing meetings.

The author used ethnographic methods and worked within an interpretive paradigm to explore the topic in this study, because the intent was to describe the development and learning of the interns as teachers engaging in opportunities for learning. The data set included observations and fieldnotes from national training sessions, interviews with the site coordinator and national trainers, field notes and audio taped conversations from the daily debrief meetings, intern journals, and national and site documents and artifacts. Through inductive, thematic analysis, this study documents how interns learned to become educators and activists at Freedom School. Key to this process was the interns' induction into a social justice movement; programmatic efforts to develop intern stance and agency as educators; and the various ways in which interns were supported in their development. The nature of the national training institute is highlighted along with examples of the activities, learning opportunities and sources of support at both national training and the local site.

Finally, the author discusses the usefulness of such an analysis in that providing a profile of Freedom School training presents an alternative model of teacher preparation and development grounded in notions of culturally responsive teaching, teaching for social justice, and preparing teachers for diversity.