Course Description
This course is part of your Spanish language learning experience, and offers you the opportunity to interact in a personal way with members of the local Latino community, thereby enriching your understanding of Hispanic cultures and the Spanish language. As a community-based learning experience, the course provides students with career-related experience working collaboratively with community agencies to address community concerns / issues. [Prereq: (Junior or Senior Standing) and (SPAN 202: Intermediate Spanish II) and (WLC Spanish Majors Only)]
Course Summary
Through my service learning experience, I gained many new perspectives and was able to learn a lot from the community’s that I have interacted with. Through out my career as a student at CSUMB I have taken three separate service learning courses which include: SL Schooling in Modern Society, SL Digital Public Art and SL in the Latino Community. I believe it’s important to recognize all of my service learning experiences because they all helped me develop new sets of understanding that I would not have gained otherwise. With every passing course I was able to apply what I have learned in each setting and use it to benefit the needs of the location that I was helping.
Digital Public Art may sound like it’s completely unrelated to my Spanish major, but although it was a lower division course it represented everything a Service Learning course is meant to be. Through this course, the professor guided the class and helped us to work closely with an organization called the Center for Community Advocacy (CCA). This organization was established to help undocumented farm workers in the Monterey County to achieve access to free and affordable health care. Their goal was to raise awareness within the community bringing dialogue to officials in power while attending town halls. Other important goals for this organization include helping undocumented workers find affordable housing that they can eventually own or finding methods that will help achieve this goal. Lastly they work with youth and education to raise awareness on important matters teaching youth that their vote matters and that they have the resources and support available to them to attain a college education. In their efforts to reach these goals, my classmates and I worked closely with the organization to create digital designs that would later become into pamphlets, t-shirts, banners, posters and a website. We held interviews with the leaders of the organization to make sure that we created a message that they saw believed reflected their values. We used Spanish speakers such as myself to translate the material to Spanish so that non-English speakers may also inform themselves with the materials that we were creating.
Through this service learning opportunity, I gained much more that was anticipated in regards to concepts of compassion, social responsibility, justice and diversity. I believe that compassion and social responsibility are closely related because without compassion people are less likely to feel like they have a social responsibility to help those who are less privileged than they are. Diversity and justice are also related in this experience because immigrant’s rights are one of the most under prioritized topics when regarding human rights. This is partially or mainly due to the rhetoric of an anti-immigrant sentiment that has arisen in the United States and poses a threat to the acceptance and need for diversity within communities.
Through SL Schooling in Modern Society and SL in the Latino Community I also gained a new appreciation for having been given the opportunity to work with children, the educational system and adult Spanish-speakers trying to learn English as a second language. Although SL Schooling in Modern Society is more unrelated to my Spanish major than SL Digital Public Art, this experience helped me learn about the different methodology’s that exists when attempting to analyze teaching structures and what benefits the educational services that are available to students from pre-k to the 12th grade. Through this opportunity I was able to witness the different teaching style of Monterey Charter Elementary School and learned that there is a diverse array of options that are available that help with the development of children. There is no one option that best serves all children through out the state or country. Obtaining educational equity is a matter of constantly analyzing what benefits the children’s education and investigating what is working, what can work and how to implement it. Education is a human right and quality education should not be a privilege. For this reason, I was able to recognize how DLAMP, Dual Language Academy was succeeding in many ways, yet still had room for improvement. For SL in the Latino Community I worked closely with 1st grade students, 5th grade students, and adults in an after school program. Across the ages I was placed in a position of aid and in helping with basic pronunciation corrections in either English or Spanish.
What was most important to highlight is that much of a student’s behavior is affected by the environment they come from. Most of the children either come from a Hispanic household or a military family due to the proximity to the military community. For most of the Hispanic children, it was most common to learn that they came from a single-parent, low-income, or working class family, or a mix of either or. This often affected their behavior in class which was most notable amongst the 5th grade students. This made me realize how economic strife, upbringing and relationships with family can effect when and how students are emotionally available to learn or focus. This was also taken into account during the community scan and in interviews I conducted with students in my previous SL course Schooling in Modern Society.
In regards to the adults in the free after school program, they were wiling to learn and practice their English with no problem. What was most interesting was the turn out. Most of the classes ranged from four to seven individuals. It was important to make sure to sign them in because participation from the community depended on whether or not the program would be shut down. In order to avoid this possibility, I helped in creating flyers so that more members of the community would be willing to come in and take the classes if they desired to. What was often a conflict for them was having to work or not having someone to care for their children why they took the class.
In both situations, I came to realize how significant it is to be available to help the community. There are many opportunities to volunteer and make a difference for people that need assistance when English is not their first language. As in the case of undocumented farmworkers, it’s easy for them to be taken advantage of or not provided with the help that they need because of language barriers. In regards to the educational system, there should be more done in order to support families that are unable to provide additions support to their own children because of the language barrier as well.
Digital Public Art may sound like it’s completely unrelated to my Spanish major, but although it was a lower division course it represented everything a Service Learning course is meant to be. Through this course, the professor guided the class and helped us to work closely with an organization called the Center for Community Advocacy (CCA). This organization was established to help undocumented farm workers in the Monterey County to achieve access to free and affordable health care. Their goal was to raise awareness within the community bringing dialogue to officials in power while attending town halls. Other important goals for this organization include helping undocumented workers find affordable housing that they can eventually own or finding methods that will help achieve this goal. Lastly they work with youth and education to raise awareness on important matters teaching youth that their vote matters and that they have the resources and support available to them to attain a college education. In their efforts to reach these goals, my classmates and I worked closely with the organization to create digital designs that would later become into pamphlets, t-shirts, banners, posters and a website. We held interviews with the leaders of the organization to make sure that we created a message that they saw believed reflected their values. We used Spanish speakers such as myself to translate the material to Spanish so that non-English speakers may also inform themselves with the materials that we were creating.
Through this service learning opportunity, I gained much more that was anticipated in regards to concepts of compassion, social responsibility, justice and diversity. I believe that compassion and social responsibility are closely related because without compassion people are less likely to feel like they have a social responsibility to help those who are less privileged than they are. Diversity and justice are also related in this experience because immigrant’s rights are one of the most under prioritized topics when regarding human rights. This is partially or mainly due to the rhetoric of an anti-immigrant sentiment that has arisen in the United States and poses a threat to the acceptance and need for diversity within communities.
Through SL Schooling in Modern Society and SL in the Latino Community I also gained a new appreciation for having been given the opportunity to work with children, the educational system and adult Spanish-speakers trying to learn English as a second language. Although SL Schooling in Modern Society is more unrelated to my Spanish major than SL Digital Public Art, this experience helped me learn about the different methodology’s that exists when attempting to analyze teaching structures and what benefits the educational services that are available to students from pre-k to the 12th grade. Through this opportunity I was able to witness the different teaching style of Monterey Charter Elementary School and learned that there is a diverse array of options that are available that help with the development of children. There is no one option that best serves all children through out the state or country. Obtaining educational equity is a matter of constantly analyzing what benefits the children’s education and investigating what is working, what can work and how to implement it. Education is a human right and quality education should not be a privilege. For this reason, I was able to recognize how DLAMP, Dual Language Academy was succeeding in many ways, yet still had room for improvement. For SL in the Latino Community I worked closely with 1st grade students, 5th grade students, and adults in an after school program. Across the ages I was placed in a position of aid and in helping with basic pronunciation corrections in either English or Spanish.
What was most important to highlight is that much of a student’s behavior is affected by the environment they come from. Most of the children either come from a Hispanic household or a military family due to the proximity to the military community. For most of the Hispanic children, it was most common to learn that they came from a single-parent, low-income, or working class family, or a mix of either or. This often affected their behavior in class which was most notable amongst the 5th grade students. This made me realize how economic strife, upbringing and relationships with family can effect when and how students are emotionally available to learn or focus. This was also taken into account during the community scan and in interviews I conducted with students in my previous SL course Schooling in Modern Society.
In regards to the adults in the free after school program, they were wiling to learn and practice their English with no problem. What was most interesting was the turn out. Most of the classes ranged from four to seven individuals. It was important to make sure to sign them in because participation from the community depended on whether or not the program would be shut down. In order to avoid this possibility, I helped in creating flyers so that more members of the community would be willing to come in and take the classes if they desired to. What was often a conflict for them was having to work or not having someone to care for their children why they took the class.
In both situations, I came to realize how significant it is to be available to help the community. There are many opportunities to volunteer and make a difference for people that need assistance when English is not their first language. As in the case of undocumented farmworkers, it’s easy for them to be taken advantage of or not provided with the help that they need because of language barriers. In regards to the educational system, there should be more done in order to support families that are unable to provide additions support to their own children because of the language barrier as well.
MLO's Satisfied
MLO 1 & 5
Work Samples
community_scan_project.pdf | |
File Size: | 1677 kb |
File Type: |