Experiential Activities for the Spanish Community Service LearningClassroom

Experiential actitivies for the csl classroom from Annie Abbott

Because a lot of language educators believe that community service learning (CSL) is only for Spanish, it's so nice to be friends and colleagues with Deb Reisinger from Duke University who does CSL with her French students. (She also does business language studies and teaches social entrepreneurship; we have many, many things in common.)

I'll be visiting her and her colleagues at Duke next week, and I'm excited to see their campus for the first time and learn more about their engaged scholarship and teaching projects. Although our universities are quite different (public/private) and in different places (small city Midwest/bigger city South), we actually are both part of the "New Latino Diaspora," a phenomenon that has the potential to radically shift how we teach Spanish in higher education in the US. (There might be a similar phenomenon for French speakers, particularly from the French-speaking Caribbean and Africa, but I'm not sure.) 

My plan is to share ways in which we can conceive of CSL courses as experiential not just in the community but also in the classroom. I don't want to overstate the "experiential" component within the classroom, but I do want to push the idea that what our CSL students do in the classroom can be active, engaging, purposeful and with an authentic audience. And those are some of the compelling characteristics of their work in the community, too.

So I've shared above the slides that I will use during the presentation. (This was the first time I created the slides within Canva. I used a template, and I'm pleased with the results.) And now I'd like to list the links and resources I will use during the presentation.

Mission-based management

To illustrate what mission-based management looks like, I'll use the following resources:

• Peter Brinkerhoff's blog, and a list of his books. 
• ECIRMAC's webpage with its mission and services.

Advocacy

To show one way we can help students prepare for the role of everyday advocate:

• Kim Potowski's "No Child Left Monolingual" TedX talk.
• My blog post about the activity I did with my students.

Digital divide

To work on students' digital literacy and understand the effects of the language divide combined with the digital divide:

• I will share an activity my students did with YouTube videos.
• This is a presentation I did on Spanish and the digital divide a few years ago: 

How do you say digital divide in Spanish? Community-Campus Partnerships with Spanish Speakers from Annie Abbott

I look forward to seeing my colleagues Deb Reisinger and Alán José and to meeting people who are doing wonderful CSL work at Duke.