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Giggles light up the first floor of Egan, a space usually silenced by the typing of keyboards and exasperated huffs of nursing students. Kindergarten students climb over Fairfield students in search of their next book to read. Fairfield students share that they’re smiling so hard it hurts.
In collaboration with The Center for Social Impact, The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures hosted two bilingual classes from Cesar A. Batalla School in Bridgeport on Tuesday morning. There, students from the Spanish course, SPAN 2210, taught by Instructor of the Practice, Professor Covadonga Arango-Martin, shared their co-authored stories at the bi-annual read-aloud day that marks the culmination of a semester’s work in the community-engaged course.
Sophomore Oliver Merriam, the Community-Engaged Learning Associate who partners with the course shares, “My dream is to become a bilingual elementary school teacher and this is the perfect experience.”
But he then asks, “Why aren’t there more events like this that highlight the University’s Jesuit mission of being people for others?” He believes collaborations like “this should happen more.”
For Covadonga, it’s her 13th year collaborating and learning with Bridgeport schools and she proudly speaks to the strides in learning that Fairfield University students take when partnering with Spanish-speaking students.
“Students get to leave campus and see another reality 10 minutes away. They get to learn from children—another experience in itself,” she states.
For Covadonga, the best teachers in the class are the kindergarten students: “Practicing Spanish in a real context, and learning what it is like to be in an uncomfortable situation with the children speaking to them in Spanish: That’s what it looks like to be with the language.”
Covadonga believes the experience can be best described as a knowledge exchange: “The students are not going there to teach the children, the children are there to teach them. Fairfield students bring something new to their kindergarten classroom, but the Cesar Batalla children teach them.”
Joel Espada, the Manager of Community Partnerships with the Center for Social Impact describes what Fairfield students bring to the kindergarten classrooms.
“English proficiency is a huge need for native Spanish speakers. But Fairfield students also expose the children to higher education at a young age, giving them something to aspire to.” Espada continues, “But it also gives them role models.”
He believes, “Community Engaged Learning courses bring joy—to the child’s education, but also to the Fairfield students experiencing that joy as well.”
Community Engaged Learning Courses (CEL) are classes with the CEL attribute in which the Center for Social Impact partners with the course professor to work with a local community school or organization. Espada adds that many Community Engaged Learning Courses are “a part of our STEP, Student Teachers Empowerment Project, a decades-long project partnering with local schools.
For this community-engaged learning course in particular, not only do students experience the world outside of Fairfield University, but “they get to do a project in which there is a purpose,” Convadonga states. “Students write a children’s book in which there will be actual readers for their work—a specific five-year-old at Cesar Batalla that they work with to create a story.”
Sophomore Drew Gray offers his main takeaway from the course: “Interacting with the kids and sharing our stories, being able to connect with people in another language that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to,” is what he leaves the course with.
In the final course reflection, Covadonga recounts that many of her students write about wanting to get engaged with more CEL courses. “They realized they can bring their knowledge to a real setting,” she declares. “They can understand what it’s like to be in the bilingual student’s shoes.”
Out of Covadonga’s 11 students, seven are continuing Spanish classes next semester and six have already declared a minor in Spanish.
When the kindergarteners learned that the books would be theirs to keep, their faces lit up with joy. And then when Lucas the Stag dressed as Santa Claus showed up, their morning could only be described as magical.
After being asked in Spanish why this was a great experience, one of the kindergartners simply pointed to the cover of the book that he helped author. His answer was evident: his ability to see himself as an author felt emocionante and empoderadora.
The campus will once again fill with joy when it welcomes students for Read Aloud Day at the end of the next semester on Thursday, May 1.
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