Course Description: This course is part of your Spanish language learning experience, and offers you the opportunity to interact in a personal way with members of the local Latino community, thereby enriching your understanding of Hispanic cultures and the Spanish language. As a community-based learning experience, the course provides students with career-related experience working collaboratively with community agencies to address community concerns/issues.
Reflective narrative: Being forced to help the community was something I did not want to do, especially because of the time. After learning more about the community and how it's important for us to serve our community, I changed. Seeing, reading and presenting about the injustice and racist problems happening in our world has made me realize that we still need to improve in many things and fast. Everyday I passed by the fields and would see the people working at a frigid weather, but that didn't stop them. Reading a NY Times paper on the Salinas Valley on how the people who work in the fields cannot afford the vegetables they pick is utterly injustice given that they work early in the morning and in horrible weather all day. Furthermore, the injustice that students faced in Arizona from the film Precious Knowledge, simply because they believed it would create hatred towards other ethnicities, is a realization that this country wants to deny the actual truth and how this nation became to be what it is now. The debate we did in class was interesting and hard. The people against ethnic studies being taught at school had it hard, whereas the people for had it easier. Either way it was an entertaining way of seeing both view points. Overall, this course has been changed the way I now see community service, I isn't just serving the community but making a change in it.