Skills developed through qualitative research and community partnerships can be essential for developing education students' cultural competency and understandings about diverse student populations. Toward this end, we developed a qualitative "service-research" project in a teacher education course focused on child development, whereby undergraduate students examined the racial, linguistic, religious, and migration experiences of youth in St. Louis, Missouri. This paper provides a snapshot of this work by defining service-research and showcasing one student research team that developed and analyzed three case studies of young women from Bosnian Muslim families in partnership with a local organization. Through an analysis and discussion of service-research and the students' results, we argue for the integration of qualitative research skills, service projects, and community partnerships into educator preparation programs.