MLO 5: Cultural Internalization and Language Immersion
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. Taught in Spanish.
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. Taught in Spanish.
Reflective Narrative:
The course Service Learning in the Chicano and Latino Community gave me the opportunity to learn about issues happening around the world and in our own surroundings within our Hispanic cultures. The objective of this course was to learn through community service which included the gain of new knowledge, new skills, new awareness of self and society. Through different articles, videos I was able to gain a new perspective towards the change that we can make as Hispanic communities, our own identity which is important to know who you are, what you represent and what you want to represent and how social identity has an impact in your life. Also, now I’m more aware of all the discrepancies that as a minority ethnic group suffer. A video that was very significant to me through this learning was the video “East Salinas” because my family and I lived in East Salinas and my mom is a field worker. This video made me very upset because our field workers suffered so many injustices and are the ones that get the harder jobs yet they get paid the lowest wages, they work ten twelve hours in the cold and hot weather. Therefore it is very important to be grateful for our field workers and as future educators advocate for them because they won’t raise their voice either because they are here illegally or because of the language barrier. I decided to do my service at a school with a group of English Learners because as newcomers they have many disadvantages as a minority group at school. My service learning helped me reflect and create the connection of my service site and my service learning class to the system of power, privilege and oppression where teachers have power over students and students for not being able to communicate over the barrier of language they have to oppress what others say and they don't know how to defend themselves. Through reflection and a presentation I was able to share my findings after my 30 hours of service. This experience was very nice because it helped me raise awareness about the challenges that newly arrived students from other countries face and take them into account when I become a teacher in the future. Something that this class left me with was the desire to continue helping my Spanish-speaking community and as a bilingual person to offer my linguistic resources to those who I can without judging.