SPAN 301S: Service Learning in the Latino Community
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.
Reflection: When I was first introduced to class, I was excited to start because I knew that I would be working with the latino community, a community that I am able to relate to, allowing me to have a better understanding of how things worked within it. I decided that I wanted to do my service at Palenke Arts, an after-school program that serviced middle school students, to help them learn a variety of art forms. I specialized in the bilingual chorus and doing translations, from english to spanish, for their webpage and other administrative work. Working there allowed me to have a better understanding of how art has an impact on the community, specifically the importance of integrating bilingualism within the arts. It also allowed me to have a better understanding of how important the arts were in general, providing a safe haven for a lot of the students that were participating. I was able to heavily relate to this because growing up I was in orchestra and that for me was my safe haven, allowing me to have a medium to express myself and I saw the same for the majority of the students there. Through this I was able to realize that having bilingualism in the arts is important because not only are students able to relate and understand their own culture a lot better through the arts but students were wanting to engage more and were able to make better connections.
Through this experience I learned a lot, from improving my language skills to having a better understanding of the impact that the arts has on the community. As I worked on translating the webpage from english to spanish, I had to really have an understanding of how the language (spanish) worked, from the various rules that are needed to spell things to finding a translation that got the message across without too much confusion. This also allowed for me to improve my writing skills because I had always had trouble with writing in spanish, for me it was something extremely difficult but as I got to work on it, it gradually improved through my time there. As I mentioned before working at Palenke Arts made me realize that the arts is something important that needs to be integrated within the community. The reason for that is because it allows for students to express themselves in others ways, from singing in a variety of languages to piecing together artworks that represent their identities and culture.
The two pieces that I decided to share to show what I have done during my service learning is my recording reflection and my final for the class. The recording reflection was an assignment in which I had to record myself answering a series of questions that touched on the overall theme of service learning and what it represents, from there I had to write a reflection based on what I had answered in the recording. The final for the class was a reflection on my overall experience of service learning for the semester, I reflected on the fact it is my third semester doing service learning and how working in a bilingual environment, able to see how bilingualism affected the community and the arts.