Spanish and Social Entrepreneurship: Week 10

We focus on social entrepreneurship that is linguistically and culturally appropriate, with 28 hours of service learning.
Week 10

by Ann Abbott

Semana 10: El riesgo

Martes

We talked about ethics. Why? Because people normally think about risk as a financial game that entrepreneurs play. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose--and lose big. But with social entrepreneurship, losing your reputation is one of the biggest risks for the organization. 

As always, we spent the first five minutes of class in paired conversation. Like I always say, in community service learning (CSL) classes, students have to be able to start and maintain conversations in Spanish, often out of thin air. Those five-minute "hablar sin parar" activities are very important.

I transitioned us to our topic--ethics--and emphasized that compliance and ethics are two different things. Just because you are not breaking a rule or a law does not necessarily mean that you are doing the most ethical thing. 

Then we went straight into the series of activities that I shared with students, and that you can find here on my SlideShare.

Ethics in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts: Spanish Community Service Learning from Annie Abbott

Jueves

On Thursday, I started out with information that I had given to Florencia Henshaw's students in my very short 20-minute talk in her "Spanish in the US" course. (Link coming soon.)

It was easy to transition back to our discussion on ethics after that, and we did the last activity on the handout. All in all, I believe we had a good discussion this week about ethics and ethical dilemmas in multilingual, multicultural environments. It's just one week, but I hope that it plants some seeds with them about behaving ethically, even when others are doing something that is unethical.

If you are interested in this topic with your students, here are some resources.

• An article, in Spanish and Portuguese, about "Ética inteligente" from Nexos magazine (the Spanish-language in-flight magazine from American Airlines.) It is written as a quiz, and that is always an interesting format for students. It's several pages long and has very good information.
• I would also recommend this book whose author is also at the Univeristy of Illinois: The Young Professional's Survival Guide: From Cab Fares to Moral Snares.