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Chin-Sook Pak is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Ball State University, Indiana. For 20 years, she has incorporated SL components to all levels of Spanish and interdisciplinary honors colloquium courses. She is the recipient of the Brian Douglas Hiltunen Faculty Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Scholarship of Engagement (Indiana Campus Compact).

As a “high impact educational experiences” (Kuh, 2008), service-learning (SL) is a form of experiential learning that focuses on community building. With its emphasis on community engagement, reflection, and reciprocity, SL can allow students to apply their classroom learning in real-world contexts, offer them authentic immersion opportunities with the target cultures and language, and prepare them for citizenship, work, and life in our multicultural, pluralistic society. Despite numerous benefits of SL on student learning and community relationship building, a major hurdle for implementing SL in the classrooms may be “how to create meaningful and doable projects” (Hertzler, 2012, p. 26).

Among the necessary criteria (Howard, 2001), SL must lead to an enhanced academic learning (i.e., How does it meet specific learning objectives of the course?), provide a meaningful service (i.e., Why does it matter to the community?), and foster purposeful civic learning (i.e., How does it better inform us about societal issues and needs, promote social responsibility, and encourage inclusivity?).

Establishing community partnerships is a necessary step for determining relevant service. If there is no existing mechanism for service placement (e.g., a supporting center on campus that coordinates activities with community agencies), one can contact businesses, churches, schools, social service agencies, or people in the community who have a personal connection to immigrant families. For example, it is possible for a Spanish class to work with only two or three immigrant families during the semester – pairs of students can meet with the same family at different times to offer different types of service (e.g., educational support for children and language tutoring for the adult parents).

SL projects may include direct services (e.g., serving at a non profit, tutoring, offering cultural/language sessions at a local school…etc.), indirect services (e.g., translation of materials, website design, educational videos…etc.), and advocacy/community action research (e.g., organizing a community forum, a report for a non-profit…etc.). For those projects that need financial support, grants for creative teaching, diversity, community engagement and students' assistant wages are available from various sources. Some projects do not require any funding (e.g., tutoring and resources in the digital format).

An archive of many syllabi of foreign language classes with a service-learning component can be found at Campus Compact: https://compact.org/discipline/social-sciences-and-humanities/foreign-language/.

Finally, a well-structured service-learning project provides students with ample opportunities for on-going reflection that connects service experience to learning.

Reflection can not only promote language and intercultural learning but also allow a critical examination of what transpires within us and our multicultural/multilingual society.

References

Ash, S. L., & Clayton, P. H. (2009). Generating, deepening, and documenting learning: The power of critical reflection in applied learning. Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, 1(1), 25-48. 

Correia, M. G. & Bleicher, R. E. (2008). Making connections to teach reflection. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2), 41-49. 

Hertzler, M. (2012). Service learning as a pedagogical tool for language teachers. In T. Sildus (Ed.), Touch the world: 2012 report of the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (pp. 21-46). Eau Claire: RMT.

Howard, J. (2001). Service-learning course design workbook. A companion volume to Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. Ann Arbor: OCSL.

Kuh, G. D. (2008).  High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Motoike, P. T. (2017). Service learning course construction and learning outcomes. In C. Dolgon, T. Mitchell, & T. Eatman (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement (pp. 132-146). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pak, C. (2013). Service-learning for students in intermediate Spanish: Examining multiples roles of foreign language study. In S. Dhonau (Ed.), MultiTasks, MultiSkills, MultiConnections: 2013 Report of the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (pp. 103-12). Eau Claire: RMT.