Category Archives: Service-Learning

Community Service with Holyoke Homework House

In my final semester here at UMass Amherst, I have been volunteering for two hours, once a week at Holyoke Homework House. Homework house is a national organization that has sites throughout the U.S. One of these locations is in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The organization is a non-profit that provides teachers, and tutors, to underserved communities to function as afterschool caretakers. These teachers and tutors help students with their homework afterschool free of charge. It provides underserved working-class families a place for their kids to go after school while they are at work.

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Why Take an Intergroup Dialogue Course?

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Dr. Ximena Zúñiga, a faculty member at UMass Amherst in the College of Education, is a leader of social justice education in higher education. Dr. Zúñiga’s article, co-written with Biren (Ratnesh) Nagda, is titled “Fostering Meaningful Racial Engagement Through Intergroup Dialogues.” Within this article, intergroup dialogue is defined as “a facilitated, face-to-face encounter that strives to create new levels of understanding, relating, and action between two or more social identity groups who have a history of conflict or potential conflict.”

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Service Learning at Fort River Elementary School in Amherst

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I had the experience of participating in service-learning with Fort River Elementary School. In 2019, Fort River piloted a bilingual elementary school program starting with two kindergarten classrooms. One classroom would spend the morning in Spanish and the afternoon in English and the other class would participate in the opposite way. Going into this service-learning, I had some previous in-school learning with Danielle Thomas in Spanish 357. In this class, we discussed differences in ways that Anglo Americans communicate with each other versus Hispano Americans. I was told that I was in the school to promote speaking Spanish in the hallways and to be a Spanish-speaking role model to the children. I spent some time in the Spanish kindergarten classroom and got to help children with their work. I also played games in Spanish during recess such as “Simón Dice” and talked with the kids during lunch. I developed my listening skills because the pronunciation was difficult to understand and I expanded my vocabulary so I would have things to talk about with the children such as every different species of animal.

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Translating Documents into Portuguese during COVID-19

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During Spring 2020 I took a Spanish translation class that transitioned to online learning and we began translating COVID documents for the community. At the same time, I was taking a public health course where we were exploring the impact that COVID is currently having on the community. I decided to translate COVID documents into Portuguese because I realized that if the Spanish community was in need of these documents then it was likely that the Portuguese community needed them as well. From my public health course, I learned that communication is key for getting the community to make positive changes towards a better community. I am grateful that I got to make a positive impact on the community. These two courses taken together gave me a better understanding of how connected public health is to communication and how I could use my knowledge of Portuguese to benefit the public health movement towards a healthier country.

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Alternative Options to Going Abroad

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Since seventh grade, I have actively been learning the Spanish language. Once I reached high school, I began to grow a love for the Spanish-speaking country, Colombia. I love their food, listening to Colombian music, their history, its landscape, telenovelas, and the overall beauty found within the country. Needless to say, for years, I’ve been wanting to travel to Colombia. Not only to gain fluency and to explore the country, but to pursue my honors thesis. The amount of times I have switched my major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is mind-blowing, but something that has always remained constant in my field of studies is my passion for humane immigration reform in the United States.

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Cov-Education Program Leading to Tutoring in Mexico

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Las summer I learned of the volunteer site called Cov-Education that focused on helping students with extra help during the Covid pandemic. The first student I was assigned to tutor never reached out to me. So I was a few weeks without touring. I didn’t expect to gain much but to tutor students in English and Spanish. However, a nonprofit organization president reached out to me a few weeks after finding my profile on the Cov-Education site. She asked me if I was okay with tutoring students outside of the United States because she needed a tutor for students who lived in the US but got deported back to Mexico. I agreed and ended up working with teenagers in Mexico. I started making lesson plans and had to figure out how to reach out to these kids through video chat. I learned a lot about myself, about teenagers, and teaching in general. I thought that if I put a little faith in myself everything would be okay. I learned the workload it is to lesson plan, teach, and the importance of being prepared. My experience in teaching these students has been a fantastic and eye-opening experience. I have learned the best way to aid them in learning while also trying to make it easier for them to adapt to learning through a screen. First, what took me to surprise is how ready they were to learn and their excitement every time they understood a concept.

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Service-Learning in Cusco, Perú

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When I went abroad to Cusco, Perú, my program offered a service-learning component. The service-learning component acted as a deciding factor for me to go through the program. The program offered several options for service-learning placements including at an alpaca farm, afterschool programs, kindergartens, medical centers, and a human rights organization. They conducted phone interviews the winter before I left with those who signed up for service-learning. During the phone interview, they took note of my level of Spanish fluency. We had a basic conversation, asking where I was from, where I went to school, and what I enjoy doing. This conversation mattered because some positions, like the human rights organization, required higher levels of fluency whereas the alpaca farm did not require these levels of Spanish. They also asked what I was looking for in a position. I told them that when I went abroad, my main goal was to gain Spanish fluency, and I viewed service-learning as an opportunity to speak more Spanish with the local community. I ranked working with children and the human rights organizations as my top two choices. They gave me options on the same call, saying I could do either. They recommended that if my goal was indeed to practice Spanish, working with children would be my best bet. The other position revolved around administrative tasks and Microsoft Excel which would have also been a great opportunity, but I figured I could develop these skills just as easily with an English-speaking position in the United States. I confirmed being placed with children. Continue reading →

Reach out to your professors and advisors, they are here to help you succeed!

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When I first got to UMass, I was very shy about advocating for myself. When I had any type of issue, I would usually avoid it instead of talking to my advisor (Luis Marentes). I have since come to realize the importance of meeting with advisors and appreciate all Luis has done for me over the past 4 years I’ve been here. As I’ve gone through many ups and downs during my time at UMass, I think the most important thing that I’ve learned is to not be afraid to advocate for myself. If I don’t do it, no one else will do it for me.

This semester is my last semester at UMass. This past September, I was enrolled in an intensive intermediate Italian course. It turns out that I hated it and needed to find a new class to switch into fast before the end of the add-drop period. With no luck finding anything on my own, I decided to reach out to Patricia Gubitosi, who I’ve had the pleasure of having as a professor and advisor. I told her about my dilemma, and she put me in contact with Danielle Thomas of the Spanish and Portuguese department. Professor Thomas does a lot of community work with Spanish speaking communities in and around Amherst. When I met with Professor Thomas, she told me that I could do an independent study with her. I had no idea what an independent study was before our meeting. I honestly thought it was something that graduate students do. During our meeting, she told me she was working on a research study, looking at the linguistic backgrounds of native and non-native Spanish speakers. She proposed that I could help with the study by doing data collection. Basically, my job would be interviewing Spanish speaking participants and doing several speaking activities with them. At first, I was a little bit nervous because I’m naturally a timid person, and feel like I’m not the best at talking with people. But I wanted to give it a chance because I knew it would get me out of my comfort zone. Continue reading →

Sustainable Tourism

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For my integrative experience, I took a gap semester and traveled with a gap year program called Carpe Diem. With Carpe, I traveled in a small group to Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras for a total of 3 months. I lived in Guatemala and Nicaragua for 5 weeks each, and then stayed in CR and Honduras for only a week each. My trip consisted of traveling to and staying in a new place just about every week, which allowed me to see and experience a ton. During my experience, I learned a lot about sustainable tourism, sustainable volunteerism, and sustainable travel, and I wanted to share some things specifically about sustainable volunteerism, because service learning is something that many students consider when thinking about an integrative experience. Continue reading →