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Drawing Parallels Between Aesthetic Experience and Life Experience—
Danny Anderson

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Background

I became interested in teaching a service learning class because many potential service projects are relevant for everyday use of Spanish in Kansas and because I am often searching for ways to motivate student interest in reading literary texts. In terms of social changes, there is a growing Spanish-speaking population that has become visible in Lawrence; in addition to promoting study abroad opportunities among Spanish majors, I wanted to promote cross-cultural opportunities in our own community. These strengthen Spanish majors’ motivation for improving their Spanish, give them opportunities to use Spanish in everyday contexts, and also contribute to our local community. In terms of reading literature, my sense is that students often find it difficult to understand literary texts as social actions, as the words of authors trying to have an effect upon readers through the aesthetic experience of reading. I hoped that service opportunities would allow my students to explore representations of Latino and Latina identities in literary texts while they were also struggling to understand identities of the Latino communities they encountered in their service activities. In short, I wanted to see if the parallels between aesthetic experience and life experience would change students’ motivation for reading literary texts.

With departmental approval, I decided to offer the course on a trial basis under SPAN 494 Special Readings: Spanish through Service Learning. The department also agreed to allow this course to satisfy elective hours in the major. I offered the class for the first time in spring 2006. Most Fridays we had time to discuss service activities. After a few general discussions, we divided into small groups based on the kinds of activities, so that students could discuss in greater detail their shared experiences. Small groups were crucial for establishing communication patterns that also led to effective small groups for oral presentations.

| Implementation

Implementation

I organized this course around a series of literary and non-literary readings, as well as films that examine the diversity of Latino identities in the United States. Students wrote two papers (one pre-service learning and one post-service learning), wrote a reflection journal (weekly entries), worked as volunteers for a minimum of two hours each week for ten consecutive weeks, turned in homework assignments and took quizzes, and prepared a major oral presentation in groups.

During the semester, guest speakers had a dramatic impact on students in this course. Students learned more about Latino/a diversity, Latino/a identities, and the social factors that have contributed to shaping individuals’ experience and their understanding. The guest speakers’ topics influenced students’ presentations later in the semester. After students completed their service learning work, the semester ended with a decompression discussion. We talked about how they were handling no longer having that service contact and how they would deal with the possibility they would not maintain those relationships. In the last week of classes, the students responded to a variety of course evaluations, surveys, and a 40-minute class evaluation conducted by a KU service learning representative. On the final exam date, we had an unorthodox meeting and last course exam. I gave the students questions ahead of time that summarized the facts of the course, and during the final, they had to record their answers to all these questions.

| Student Performance

Student Performance

One of the key elements in a second language class is motivation. The level of motivation in this course was dramatically different, far more intense than anything I have ever experienced in the undergraduate classroom. Students had commitments and personal missions that were driving their questions and desire to improve their Spanish.

I wrestled with grading and the criteria for grading, especially because I gave a lot of As and Bs as grades. On one hand, I think everyone went overboard in the amount of time that they put into their projects, and that they earned their points. On the other hand, I worry about pressures to check grade inflation when I have a class with all A and B grades. Sometimes I hear colleagues describing service learning as a less rigorous way of studying, and I worry that high grades feed into that perception. However, I believe that the students’ level of motivated expression is the best that I have ever had in any class I have taught. When I looked at the quantity of work that the students had completed and especially the quality of their group presentations, I was profoundly impressed by their achievements. Service learning gave the students a genuine motivation to analyze literary texts and social situations and to express what they discovered through critical thinking. In terms of content, the group presentations were the best that I have ever seen in a course at this level; in terms of language mastery, their communicative success was dramatic and their grammatical accuracy was far above average. The effectiveness of their rhetorical strategies for organizing ideas in a persuasive manner and the energy of their public speaking personalities were the best I have seen among Spanish majors. This is also reiterated by the reflection journal entries that I interpreted as demonstrating how profoundly students had responded to the course.

| Reflections

Reflections

Adding service learning to this course was very rewarding. I would encourage other faculty members to consider ways that a service learning component could be added to an existing course; not all courses need to be devoted entirely to service learning, but in many classes service learning projects could be important options or even requirements.

I made lots of changes along the way to respond to class needs, but overall I believe that the proposed course really “clicked” with students. They worked harder than in any other class I have taught. They expressed interest in and insights about literary works that were more profound than what I have encountered in other undergraduate classes. It is often a struggle to respond to students who say, “I am not interested in literature,” or “I do not like reading.” One of my goals in this course was to show students the relationship between literary texts and human experience, to help them see literature not as a distant object enshrined on a pedestal but as a voice in an often contentious dialogue, a voice that is competing for their attention and their commitments. For the students in this class, I think it worked! The most surprising detail after the class was complete was the relation between literary understanding and personal experience. Whereas I had expected the students to call upon aspects of personal experience as evidence to use when interpreting the short story in their second paper, the opposite seemed to occur. The students all tended to use their understanding of the literary text as a way to come to terms with their own experiences. I will try to make greater use of this practice in future assignments to explore a bit more the nature of student interest in literary works.

| Summary

Project Summary

Adding a service-learning component to a Spanish literature course helped students connect aesthetic and life experiences.

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