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.
I required students to put in a minimum of 20 hours of service learning work. Some probably put in three to four times that much, with only two or three students completing the minimum number. One paperwork concern was getting back the student evaluations from the service learning supervisors. At the end of the semester, it took three weeks for me to receive 16 of the 20 evaluations. Whereas I had hoped to receive biweekly evaluations, in the end I felt lucky to get a single evaluation for the ten-week period.
The students during the semester served in the following places: ESL classroom volunteers at Hillcrest Elementary School; after-school tutors for elementary students through a program sponsored by El Centro, Inc. of Kansas City; personal tutors for individuals and families through KU’s Project Bridge and the community-based Small World; translation of materials for Women’s Transitional Care Services and Douglas County AIDS Project; Mother-to-Mother as medical translators during prenatal examinations; Latino Community Coalition working on a variety of projects such as children’s health fairs, community safety events, facilitating access to the public library and the bilingual story hour, informational newsletters, and updating directories of services for Spanish-speaking communities; state and federal income tax declarations sponsored by legal aid groups and private tax services; and CAMP (College Assistance for Migrants Program).
Given this range of placements, the actual student duties also varied widely. Some activities, such as medical translating, required some mandatory training. Agencies such as Women’s Transitional Care Services and Douglas County AIDS Project require training about confidentiality. Students who did translation of documents often sought other activities in order to have more direct personal contact with Latino community members. Most individuals involved in educational activities worked with individuals or small groups; on a few occasions, these individuals served as interpreters during parent-teacher conferences in the schools. The activities sponsored by the Latino Community Coalition tended to be more focused on meeting a deadline for a sponsored event. The main tax preparer in our group was overwhelmed by interest in her skills and service during the weeks leading up to the April 15th deadline for filing income tax returns.
Most Fridays we had time for group discussions about the service activities. After a few general discussions, we divided into smaller groups based on the kinds of activities, so that students could discuss in greater detail their shared experiences. These small groups were crucial for establishing the communication patterns that also led to effective small groups for oral presentations.
Guest speakers had one of the most dramatic impacts on students in this course. The first speaker, Richard Rodríguez of the School of Education at KU, has a polished presentation about Latino/a diversity. After his presentation early in the semester, we had three different days in which young Latino/a peers from KU and the community visited the class to discuss their experience of life in the United States. Often at the end of a presentation, class members left wanting to cry—the presentations were usually extremely emotional. A task in later class meetings would be to put the presentation into focus through critical thinking about how these individuals have experienced their Latino/a identities and the social factors that have contributed to shaping both the experience and their understanding of it.
The semester ended with a decompression discussion. The service activities were complete by that point, and we talked about how students were handling no longer having that service contact and how they would deal with the possibility they would not maintain those relationships. This was important because many of the students became attached to the people with whom they worked, and they were sad about the conclusion of the interaction. Besides the personal emotions, I wanted them to think about how their reactions involved politically structured feelings. My own scholarship in cultural studies has links to these ideas: personal reactions we think of as personal and private often go unexamined when, in reality, such reactions are structured by a larger context that is both social and public. I promoted critical thinking about the implications of how the students both experienced and understood the division between personal/social, private/public and how these divisions structured what they perceived as the possible actions they could or should take in our society and in our world.
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. The purpose was to provide one more chance to pull all of the course material together in a record of what they had learned and accomplished. In theory, everyone should have been able to make a 100% on this exercise, and it did not carry a huge weight in the course grade.| << Background | ^TOP^ | Student Performance >> |
