Service Learning Reflection

When I begin teaching, I know that I will be working with students from all backgrounds. Therefore, I feel blessed that I was given the opportunity to have an open discussion with parents of diverse learners. I believe that I have learned a lot about myself from this experience.

I hope that I can always remember the important lessons I learned from this experience. I grew up in a community that was lacking in diversity, therefore I have appreciated all of the experiences I have had in college working with people from diverse backgrounds. When I begin teaching, I will take into consideration the lessons I learned from this project. I will do my best to assist not only my bilingual students, but their parents as well. I believe that the students and parents could grow and learn together in a way that I have never experienced.

Growing up, I studied a foreign language for a few years, however it never really stuck. I believe that in order to become truly bilingual you need to start at a young age. Therefore, I hope to let my students experience the wonderful world of bilingualism. I also believe that all students will benefit from the experiences diverse learners would bring to the classroom.

Earlier this week, a group of students and I interviewed parents of culturally diverse learners. We were given the opportunity to discuss many aspects of living and learning with these parents. As a group, we asked them about their interactions with the school and teachers in order to find out how improvements could be made. I believe that this was an important conversation that we will remember for the remainder of our lives.

While interviewing our family, we had moments of success and moments of embarrassment and indecision. When we asked questions that were easily understood and answered we felt like we were accomplishing something. However, when we had to repeatedly rephrase our questions we felt nervous and unsure of how to proceed.

I believe that our actions will have an impact on many people. First of all, our actions will impact the family that we interviewed. Hopefully, we showed them that teachers and future teachers care about them and their children. I hope we made them feel that their opinions mattered. I believe that our actions will also impact those who view our tape in the future.

This project related to topics we have discussed in class in a variety of ways. First of all, we have discussed working with culturally diverse learners. We have studied stereotypes and how to break them. In terms of technology, we were given the opportunity to explore the uses of video cameras and we learned how to edit our tapes. In the future, I know that we will be asked to videotape our lessons and we will have an advantage over those students who have not had a chance to make and edit a videotape. In order to fully learn these lessons, I believe it was important for us to be active learners. We had to work through our problems as a group in order to get a finished product. We could not have learned these very important lessons without participating in the service learning project.

There are a few underlying and/or over-arching issues that influenced the problem our project was addressing. First of all, parents of culturally diverse parents often are not heard by teachers. Our project gave them a chance to feel important and voice their concerns. It is important for future teachers to be aware of what they can do to better serve all of their students. In order to better the situation, schools with large populations of bilingual students and parents could form classes to assist the families with their language skills. The students could also be showed ways that they could teach their parents.

The realizations that I have come to from this assignment will remain with me in the future. I am not sure what is currently being done to assist these parents, however I can think of things that could be done in the future. I hope that as a teacher I can be there to guide and educate both my students and their parents so that they can grow and learn together. There are many things that can be done to help these families out and it is our job to make sure that they are done.