Spanish & Illinois

Picture is from sasaki.com by Kelly Klus As many of my friends and I have been thrown into the reality of graduation, I’ve had several reflective conversations about the Champaign-Urbana community. C-U has an unbelievable amount of resources and opportunities, of nooks and crannies that are impossible to explore within four years. The campus community has so much to offer in the form of RSOs, clubs, fascinating research, professionals and experts in any given field; the surrounding community has even more to add. ECIRMAC and SOAR were two of these niches that I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to explore some of the great diversity CU has to offer- especially grateful that these two organizations allowed me to explore diversity that was not centered in the University experience. According to ECIRMAC’s website, 24.3% of Urbana’s residents speak a language other than English at home, more than the reported 20.1% nationwide. Getting to interact with a portion of th...

Students in my SPAN 232 course, "Spanish & Entrepreneurship: Languages, Cultures & Communities," have to do a team project in addition to their 28 hours of community service learning work. These are the results of one of the teams from Spring 2014. The intent is to have them go through the entrepreneurial process on a small scale, create something of true value, and develop their teamwork skills. --Ann Abbott What?  Our group consisted of three members (Ryan, Celia, and myself). The purpose of our group project was to help out the East Central Illinois Refugee Mutual Assistance Center (ECIRMAC) organize their fundraising dinner. The East Central Illinois Refugee Mutu a l Assistance Center (ECIRMAC) has provided services to refugees and their families in the East Central Illinois area for 32 years. In the past year alone, they have served over 2,100 clients! Their services include resettlement, translation, adjustment, ci t izenship,and a children...

Students in my SPAN 232 course, "Spanish & Entrepreneurship: Languages, Cultures & Communities," have to do a team project in addition to their 28 hours of community service learning work. These are the results of one of the teams from Spring 2014. The intent is to have them go through the entrepreneurial process on a small scale, create something of true value, and develop their teamwork skills. --Ann Abbott by César, Skye and Kim What? Our group project was to act as the “web masters” for the East Central Illinois Refugee Mutual  Assistance Center (ECIRMAC) Facebook page. The women from the ECIRMAC office made clear  they wanted us to post information relevant to the mission and work of the Refugee Center every weekday (Monday through Friday) to maintain the interest of followers and clients. Our posts varied depending on the amount of news coming from the office. Some of our posts consisted of updates around the office and information about upcoming ...

Students in my SPAN 232 course, "Spanish & Entrepreneurship: Languages, Cultures & Communities," have to do a team project in addition to their 28 hours of community service learning work. These are the results of one of the teams from Spring 2014. The intent is to have them go through the entrepreneurial process on a small scale, create something of true value, and develop their teamwork skills. --Ann Abbott by Carli Smith & Chris Levin e What? For our project, we created profiles on past U of I students who are working or have worked in social entrepreneurial careers related to Spanish and the community. Each past student was interviewed with the same set of questions. These questions focused on the positions and roles that they have, how prepared they were from the Spanish program at U of I, and advice for future students looking to follow similar career paths. We were able to contact Nicole Stawiarski and Jessie Faus. To create these profiles, we dec...

Kelly and David Students in my SPAN 232 course, "Spanish & Entrepreneurship: Languages, Cultures & Communities," have to do a team project in addition to their 28 hours of community service learning work. These are the results of one of the teams from Spring 2014. The intent is to have them go through the entrepreneurial process on a small scale, create something of true value, and develop their teamwork skills. --Ann Abbott What? For our project, we chose to write a grant proposal for the after-school program called SOAR that takes place at Garden Hills elementary school. The SOAR program is designed to help second language learners from low-income families in the Champaign Unit 4 school district improve reading, writing, and math skills. The program is coordinated by the University of Illinois Center for education in small urban communities in conjunction with the bilingual program at Garden Hills. Each semester, three days of the week, University service-...

Students in my SPAN 232 course, "Spanish & Entrepreneurship: Languages, Cultures & Communities," have to do a team project in addition to their 28 hours of community service learning work. These are the results of one of the teams from Spring 2014. The intent is to have them go through the entrepreneurial process on a small scale, create something of true value, and develop their teamwork skills. --Ann Abbott What? The team project that we chose to do was to plan, pro m ote, and carry out a Spanis h -language booth at a community literary event called Read Across A m erica at Lincoln Square Mall in Urbana, Illinois. W e had three group m embers who divided the work a m ongst the m selves early in the se m ester to carry out the project in the m ost efficient m anner possible. The event allowed us to provide a service to the people of Cha m paig n -Urbana. Our work in the com m unity throughout this se m ester with Spanish 332 has shown us th e nu m ber of Spa...

Ariel, Linnea and Pamela Students in my SPAN 232 course, "Spanish & Entrepreneurship: Languages, Cultures & Communities," have to do a team project in addition to their 28 hours of community service learning work. These are the results of one of the teams from Spring 2014. The intent is to have them go through the entrepreneurial process on a small scale, create something of true value, and develop their teamwork skills. --Ann Abbott What? Our group’s goal was to write a case study about Brittany Koteles, a 2011 Illinois graduate who has now focused her life on social entrepreneurship. To begin, we researched Brittany’s work on Ann’s blog and combed through some documents we found online about her experiences and accomplishments. At University of Illinois, Brittany designed her own major: public and community service and well as Spanish. After graduating college, Brittany did a Fulbright in Barcelona and studied the best practices in social entrepreneurship a...

by Ann Abbott While reading through my students' community participation self-evaluations last week, I was struck once again by how students can work with the same community partner and have totally different perceptions of what they did there. One student wrote about all the different kinds of tasks she did, how she asked for more to do. She even earned the nickname of "The Special One" because the supervisors recognized how much she contributed to the organization during her CSL work. Furthermore, this student worked way more than the required 28 hours during the semester. A different student who worked in *the exact same place* wrote that there wasn't much to do. These two students worked in the same place, with the same supervisors, and with the same classroom support. So what's the difference? I don't know for sure, of course, but this is my intuition based on many years of experience: Comfort with ambiguity. In the classroom, stude...

by Nicole Mathes A School of Fish Recently, Ms. Perez’s class got a big fish tank with two clownfish and two snails. I have never seen a class so excited about a fish tank or so interested in learning about the different types of fish, coral, algae, and snails. The students were so eager to learn that Ms. Perez set up a time to Skype the man, Ben, who gave the class the tank and fish (as a background note: from my understanding, there is a company that donates the fish and tanks to schools who apply and ask for the donation and give a specific reason for wanting one. This man was an employee of the company). Ben was very patient and answered all the students’ questions. Over the course of the Skype session, I learned the following: you cannot put more than two clownfish together in a tank because they do not get along with other clown fish (two is company, three is a crowd). However, they get along with other types of fish. there are SEVERAL types of snails that act as ...

Photo By Jim Young/Reuters . by Kelly Klus Since I’ve been working at ECIRMAC, I’ve been trying to consciously seek out news about immigration reform—a task for me, that is, unfortunately, easier said than done. With classes, school wrapping up, finals season, I usually find my upkeep of national and global news falling by the wayside. The rock that I live on isn’t so large; the bubble of my life isn’t so impenetrable that the news about immigration reform in the past two weeks hasn’t squeaked past here and there. I spent the afternoon today looking up ‘immigration reform news’ to supplement and complete the bits and pieces that I’ve heard on the radio and in snippets of the news. The fact that no real movement has happened to the bipartisan immigration reform bill since last June shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, based on our political system. The bill, recently passed in the Senate is still being tossed around in the House—even though speaker John Boehner has sai...

Each student contributed five pins that would be helpful to future students. Click here to see the board. by Ann Abbott All in all, I am very pleased with the results of the final exam that I gave to my students in the "Spanish in the Community" course. Students had to follow the instructions at this link in order to create five pins and add them to a Pinterest board for the course. My goals were for students to learn about and experience content curation and to apply those principles in the creation of a helpful digital repository of images and links. Whatever your feelings about Pinterest, there is no doubt that it is a very useful way to organize and contextualize web- and image-based information. Here are some of my observations about the test, about Pinterest and about the students. Students' pins reflect what they think is important in the course. Immigration.   Students pinned resources that provide immigrants' personal stories, myths about immi...