The first research question asked how the university students assessed their participation in the service-learning program and what they believed they learned from the experience. The students' final reflective essays demonstrated an overwhelmingly positive response to the class itself and to the service-learning experience in particular. All of the student essays reflected the notion that the service component enhanced and complemented the learning done in the traditional classroom setting, reinforcing what had been reported by Markus, Howard, and King (1993); Boss (1994); and Morton and Troppe (1996).
Regarding the service-learning experience and the impact it had on his learning, one student wrote:
My experiences in service learning always leave me with a great feeling of accomplishment. It is rare that people take time away from their lives to contribute to their communities. Learning how greatly a person can benefit from a small part of your time has been one of the greatest pieces of knowledge that I have collected in my education… The time that I have spent [in the community] has been the most beneficial for myself. Learning through other people is far more valuable than learning from a lecture or reading. I believe that what I have learned this semester will continue through my entire life, instead of forgetting what I learned right away, after the test was taken or the paper was written.2
Speaking more specifically to the content of the class, the same student observed how doing the readings, participating in the class discussion, and interacting with the children together worked to dispel the myth that we are all "media experts." As avid consumers of media, he wrote, we might have some knowledge about how the media operate, which is not the same as being experts or even literate enough to comprehend what the meanings and ideological constructs behind media messages really are. He further elaborated that the distinction between being savvy media consumers and media "experts" became clear for him after the first few workshop sessions, when he realized that the children's impressive "media savviness" didn't necessarily lead them to adequately process and interpret the messages they consume.
Another student similarly noted how working with a different "audience" changed his own perspective on media issues:
Working with the kids was an eye-opener, because they have a different perspective on the way life is represented by various media sources. I was able to broaden my own perspective, and I believe the kids took something away from the experience that they might not have had otherwise.
One student believed he learned some very practical skills as a direct result of the service-learning work he did. After confessing that he is an extremely shy person, the student wrote that the experience boosted his self-confidence and showed him how much he can learn from interacting with a group (i.e., the younger students) with which he had never interacted before. Another student said she gathered some important information she intends to use in her own future career as a teacher:
The service-learning project has given me a taste of what it might be like to teach at the elementary level… I feel like I have what it takes to successfully teach children: a great deal of patience, compassion, and understanding.
Another student made interesting observations about how much she learned from interacting with a different culture, and how much having a very personal, direct contact with a predominantly Hispanic group helped her to revise some stereotypes:
My service-learning experience helped me to understand and learn about diversity within the Hispanic culture… Before I first went to CCES, I had stereotypical opinions about the Hispanic culture. The children at César Chavez helped me to break those opinions. I learned how difficult it is for these families and children to assimilate into our culture.
In their journals and essays, several students wrote about the many stereotypes they had about East Salinas - a "violent, gang-controlled" area of town, as most of them first defined it - and how out of touch with reality that picture really was. One student recalled apprehensively driving to CCES for the first time, not knowing exactly what he was "getting into," only to find himself in a part of town with houses, shops, and restaurants, people walking down the streets, mothers pushing their babies in strollers, and other scenes that conveyed "a strong sense of community." Another student directly linked those stereotypes to the class's content by noting how much media messages (especially local news reports) had contributed to his distorted perception of East Salinas and its population. "The only thing they show in the news about Salinas is gang violence, drive-by-shootings, and crime in general," a student observed during class discussion.
The "language/ethnicity issue" surfaced many times in the class throughout the semester. Although 40 of the 48 university students were English-only speakers, many of the children at CCES could speak and communicate only in Spanish. One of the ways CSUMB students and I found to work around that potential communication barrier was to assign at least one bilingual CSUMB student to each one of the workshop groups. Those students became responsible for translating the presentations, guidelines, and materials and for trying to engage the Spanish speakers in all workshop activities.
Many of the journal entries indicate a gradual change in perception regarding the "language issue." At the beginning of the workshop, some CSUMB students felt frustrated for not speaking Spanish (which rendered them unable to communicate with some of the CCES children), but as the semester progressed, those same students started to feel comfortable enough to approach, communicate with, and try to fully integrate into the group, English and non-English speakers alike. Several CSUMB students reported that the attempt to communicate across languages and cultures was beneficial to the whole group. An Anglophone student observed, for example, how much he was able to identify with the Spanish-only speakers: the children's self-consciousness about their English skills reminded him how self-conscious he felt whenever he tried to practice his Spanish.
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