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Spotlight
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Service Learning Courses
A second-language acquisition course required for all majors and minors that focuses on the areas of listening comprehension, oral communication and exposure to the culture. Instead of doing some of the traditional tasks (like discussion boards and web-based assignments), students engage in a virtual immersion program through community service.
A content-based course at the advanced level, literature track, that integrates community service as another text, to complement the literary readings and the movies and documentaries that we study in class. Four Latino/a immigration experiences are examined: Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American, and Dominican-American.
A content-based course, literature track, which focuses on Latinas through the discussion of autobiographical texts and testimonials, movies and documentaries. Community service complements class discussions, and students have to write a testimonial based on their service experience. Four students majoring in Education, Child Development, ELL, and Special Education worked at Haywood Elementary, and twenty-eight students from 202 and 243 worked at Overton High School. For the Telling Latina Lives course, students teamed up with a support group for Latinas coordinated by Mrs. Luisa Hough, Hispanic Outreach Specialist for the Mental Health Association of Middle TN.
Students met with their community partners for two hours every week, for a total of 20 hours. Students who chose Haywood went to the school, and the ones who chose Overton went to their partners’ homes. This was a special treat because oftentimes they were “adopted” by their host families; they ate supper togeth During the semester, there were several critical reflection activities (roundtables, journals, reflection ess Telling Latina Lives group: Amigos:
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The students in these courses served primarily as tutors and mentors, trying to make a difference in the areas of academic performance (student/teacher communication, study habits, grades, retention, graduation rates) and social behavior (gang activity and teenage pregnancy are two very serious problems). Although the program is geared to Metro students, oftentimes the parents also got involved, and the students ended up teaching them English as well.
er, and they got invited to school activities, like plays and soccer games, and family celebrations, like birthday parties, quinceañeros, baby showers, etc. On the other hand, the Vanderbilt students took their partners, and sometimes the whole family, to campus, to football games, their dorms, the Frist Center, etc.
ays) where the Vanderbilt students unpacked their service experience, compared notes, connected what they were studying in class with what they were observing in their community work, supported one another, asked questions, etc. Because of the nature of the course, students in 243 were better equipped to deal with certain situations. They studied topics like otherness, “life on the hyphen,” language barrier between parents and children, role reversal, transnational families, rage and self-destruction, etc. For the students in 202, roundtables were very important because they provided them with the only space where they could periodically address these issues and process them as a group. On the other hand, while all students in Spanish 202 watched movies and videoclips dealing with several aspects of immigration to the US, roundtables allowed students, who actually met and got the chance to learn first-hand about the challenges that real-life immigrants need to face, the chance to speak informally about topics specifically relevant to them, instead of the usual “scripted” communication based on a “controlled” topic.
uller (Span. 243, worked with a girl from Mexico who has a baby)