SPAN 301S: Service Learning in the Chicano/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. [Prereq: (Junior or Senior Standing) and (SPAN 202) and (WLC Spanish Majors Only)]
Course Reflective Narrative By taking this course I fulfilled MLO 1, this class is very important for my language learning experience because it allowed me to interact with members the Latino members of my community. This service learning class gave my the opportunity to learn more about the Hispanic culture and language. I decided to volunteer in my community, Watsonville at youth now. Since I want to be a teacher I decided to be a tutor for middle school students. This experience gave me knowledge about students and their ways of learning. My language proficiency also expanded, I was able to tutor a student who was taking Spanish courses. Since the student was in middle school I had to figure out an easy way to teach her, this developed my vocabulary skills. In some cases I had to translate messages for the parents, I also participated in a Welcome to the parents where I had to speak Spanish. This event gave my the opportunity to develop my language knowledge. Moreover in class the professor gave us readings where I learned about what makes ones identity and the importance that language has. The readings were written in a high academic spanish and that was very useful to develop my language proficiency and ability. Service learning helped my increase my speaking, listening, reading and writing abilities. At the end of the course I did a presentation about my service learning experience at Youth now, through this activity I developed my public speaking ability in the target language for my major. From the experience of tutoring the student who had Spanish courses I developed my listening ability. I had to listen to her explanations of what she learned in class and what was still confusing for her. The reading and writing abilities were mainly developed in class, the professor provided readings and requested students to write a response. The response had to be well explained in an essay form, all the readings and responses contributed to build my language proficiency.