Span 301S: Service Learning in the Chicano/Latino Community
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.
This class was taught by Dr. Rafael Gomez. In this class we were encouraged to become more familiar with the Latino community in our area. We learned about some of the issues faced by that group of people, as well as the resources that benefited them in the Salinas/Watsonville/Seaside area. We were all required to complete 30 hours of community service as well. I chose to do my community service with an organization called Everyone's Harvest. It was started in 2003 by a CSUMB alumni named Iris Diana Jehle-Peppard. The mission of the organization is "To help communities gain access to healthy, affordable food through certified farmer's markets and community projects." The organization has five farmers markets. I volunteered at the Alisal Certified Farmers Market every tuesday, on East Alisal Street in Salinas. I would sometimes work at the cooking demonstration tent, making salads and other free samples. I also worked at the question booth and tried to help people if they had a question about how to pay with their EBT cards and things of that nature. It was a fun experience and I got to meet some really nice people. Towards the end of the semester groups of us did a "community scan," in which we gave a presentation on a given community. Myself and my partner chose King City, in southern Monterey County. Also in this class we were taught how to have a functional debate. After we had spent a couple of weeks learning about this we had a debate on whether or not it should be mandatory for high school students in California to take Hispanic culture classes. I was assigned to the team that was opposed to this, and against all odds we won! This course fulfills the service learning requirement.