Spanish and Entrepreneurship: Week 3

by Ann Abbott

Almost all my students are squared away with their community partners now. There are about three who are still waiting, but hopefully they will hear back from the community partner and be able to start soon.

Día 1, Semana 3

Today was another active class. Students had to get up and change partners frequently. To form partners, I usually go around the room and count. If I have 20 students and want them to work in pairs, I count students until 10 and then count another ten. Then I say, "Uno con uno, dos con dos, etc." This ensures that students work with many other students, not just the ones they tend to sit with.

1. 3 minutes. In pairs, talk about your community partners, orientation and any work that you have already started doing. (As they talked to each other, I was able to follow up with a few students who haven't yet completely figured out their CSL work.)

2. 5 minutes. In groups of three, talk about your reactions and questions about the book reading that you attended last week instead of coming to class. Out of 24 students, four were not able to attend either one of the author events. They had to read a chapter of the book, write two pages of reaction/analysis and then include four questions that they would have asked the author if they could have attended the events. So to conclude this portion of class, I read a few of those questions to the class, and the students who did attend the events answered them for the students who couldn't attend. That worked out nicely.

Transition. "Attending the book reading and author events gave you perspective into one undocumented immigrant's life and perspective. That allows you to better understand many, though not all, undocumented immigrants better. Now, we are going to pivot to the lives of immigrants (documented or not) in our community."

3. 5 minutes. I copied and printed four recent Facebook posts from a private Facebook group dedicated to supporting Latino immigrants in our community. (I did not include any private information!) Each student read only one of those posts. After they read, they had to form groups of three with people who read different posts than theirs and present and discuss each post. The posts were about these four topics:

• Banks asking for social security numbers.
• Finding the right lawyer for your immigration needs.
• SNAP
• DACA 

I asked students to raise their hand if the post they read was old news to them, if they already knew all the information it contained. Only one student raised her hand. In other words, reading these posts helped them understand the immigrants they will work with and their realities in new ways.

Transition. One of the posts was about DACA, and we have heard a lot of about that and Dreamers in the news lately. But there is one group of young, undocumented immigrants that no one is talking about: our unaccompanied minors. These are children, mostly from Central America, who crossed the borders from their country to ours alone, without their parents. In other words, the story people tell about the Dreamers--"Their parents brought them here; it's not their fault they are undocumented"--does not apply to this group of children who came here mostly beginning in the summer of 2014 and who came to escape violence, especially gang violence, in their countries. Let's read about some of those children who go to the schools were some of you will work for this course.

4. 5 minutes. Again, I had four recent posts about unaccompanied minors in our community. Students read one post then sat with someone who had read a different post. They presented and commented on their posts. I then asked each group to write down at least two questions they had after reading those posts. (I'll go through those questions later.)

Transition. Why did we read these posts and do these activities? Students gave good answers, and I added that while many CSL students "discover" that undocumented immigrants are just like them (not like the criminals the media portray them as), on the other hand, they are not like them at all. Most of us have privileges as citizens that we aren't even aware of, and that makes our lives very different.

5. Un recado. Now I wanted students to see an example of services that the community offers for our Latino immigrant community. Everyone took a pink telephone message slip and filled it out as I read the following message several times.

DIA LATINO DE SALUD DENTAL en PARKLAND COLLEGE

EL 3 DE FEBRERO

Llamar y dejar mensaje (en espanol) entre las 9 am y las 5 pm lunes a viernes al (217) 417-5897 para hacer cita.

Citas para exámenes dentales sin costo desde las 7:45 de la mañana hasta mediodía.

No habrá cuidado de niños.

Despensa de alimentos de 8:30 a 12:30 para TODOS.

Many students struggled to understand and write down the message. "What was hard about it?" I asked. "The numbers!" they said.

To wrap it all up, I said, "So this semester we need to learn about immigration, immigrants, and..." "Spanish!" students said.

And they will learn. I know it.

[I don't want to put the Facebook posts that I shared here, in this public forum. But if you would like to use them for your own teaching, send me a message at arabbott@illinois.edu, and I will share them with you.]

Día 2, Semana 3

This is the day that I need to pull the pieces together. The first week of classes, we had to get geared up for working in the community. The second week, we cancelled classes so students could attend orientation and attend a book reading. This week, I need to reign things back in. I can seem like we're going in too many different directions if I don't show the common thread.

So today I brought us back around to the topic of our course: social entrepreneurship.

1. I explained social entrepreneurship to the students. This is the definition we use, although others define it slightly differently.

• Social enterprises exist in order to create social value, not to make profits for shareholders/owners.
• Social enterprises are nonprofit organizations (organizaciones sin fines de lucro). But not all nonprofits are social enterprises. Yes, they both accept donations and grants, but social enterprises do something else: they sell products or services. That money goes back into the enterprise's programming, not into stockholders' pockets. In other words, generan ingresos propios.

2. We looked at one specific example of a social enterprise, Homeboy Industries. If you click on their tienda virtual you can buy items that are a byproduct of their job-training programs.

3. We looked at another specific example of a social enterprise, Idealist.org. Their volunteer/internship/job matching site is free for some users because other users pay for it.

4. To summarize, students read this post: "¿Es mi organización una empresa social?" After they read, I put students in pairs and they looked at these two examples from the blog post in order to identify how they generate income: Njambre y Auara. (The second was easier for them to discern than the first.)

Three weeks down, 11 more to go!