Lauren's Post #4

When first working at Anna’s Arts for Kids this semester, I think I was quick to look at ways in which the program was run in a more analytical way. However, after spending time there over the course of the semester I became more divorced from that way of looking at the program from an outsiders perspective because I became more entrenched in the actual work and began to feel like more of a part of the program itself. I am glad that this happened fairly quickly because my experience became more and more positive as time went on. Instead of ruminating on the program or my work there or the childrens’ attitudes, I began simply just showing up and doing what I needed to do from moment to moment. A large reason why I think this happened is because I became accustomed to the schedule of the program and also got to know the kids’ personalities. 

Though I didn’t truly connect my classwork to my Service Learning as it was happening, writing blog posts, cluster convos, and talking about some relevant issues and themes during class always made it easy for me to draw connections while in an academic setting. I have really benefited from having Service Learning for this class as well as Race and Class in Schools because it has made me able to bounce around different and similar ideas in both contexts. I feel as if I have a more well-rounded understanding of issues such as the achievement gap, literacy rates, the effect family has on their children, fate, the accessibility of education, and looking at what makes reading accessible. By well-rounded I do not mean that I understand these issues fully or their effects. I do, however, feel as if I understand these issues on a different level because I was able to not have these issues running through my mind as I was working with these children; if I did, I don’t think I would have been much help or have been the type of person that these kids or the program needed. Through Service Learning I was simply doing my part by being one of the small pieces that are necessary to keep organizations like Anna’s Arts for Kids running and are trying to make a dent in these large, complex issues––even at least in the lives of a few children. If anything, I now understand that there are many different levels of involvement that are necessary in running a program that is fighting against large social, economic, and educational issues. I feel as if this placement was a great fit for me because I feel comfortable in being that smaller piece. 

In my last blog post, I discussed the connection between Shakespeare and Service Learning in terms of accessibility. This connection has stuck out to me the most, and it has been something I’ve been thinking a lot about and have also brought this connection into my other class. In my other class, I’m writing my final paper on approaches to improve literacy rates that involve making children develop their own genuine interest in reading. Dr. Eklund’s way of stimulating conversations on all of the works we read made Shakespeare so much more accessible to me. I mentioned in class that I enjoyed the structure of the classes because I would learn important information on Tuesdays that would often make me more engaged and willing to approach the texts in my own way on Thursdays and in future classes. I really loved this class so much because of the many different ways we were exposed to Shakespeare (e.g., reading, Service Learning, lectures, discussions, scene presentations). There are many different ways that Anna’s Arts makes education more accessible to the children, such as having a variety of available classes such as nutrition, choir, gardening, and instrument lessons. There are also times for games which gives the kids a chance to unwind and also allows for them to work on social and collaboration skills. These available opportunities are just a few of the ways that Anna’s Arts for Kids gives the students many options to explore their own interests and inform their own relationship with these different versions and approaches to learning and developing. It’s hard to describe lasting effects that I think I’ll have in one blog post. In fact, it’s hard to process coherently at all, but the overarching effect would be that I have a better understanding of the importance of incorporating a variety of approaches to people because we all have different interests, ways of learning, and levels of engagement. I also understand more of the importance of collaboration and having various levels of involvement when trying to tackle larger, complex issues. 

Final Post

I said a bittersweet goodbye to the APEX center this Wednesday.  At first, I admit that part of me was glad that I would no longer have to venture into the neighborhood surrounding APEX and spend my Wednesday afternoons cooped up at a computer when I could be enjoying the spring sunshine.  But at the same time, I knew it was incredibly selfish for me to feel that way.  I also realized that I’m going to miss volunteering there. I had to think about why I would miss it.  I spent the majority of my time there doing office work, and who would miss that? But it isn’t the office work that I’m going to miss; it’s the community at APEX, as well as the ability of helping those in need. 

As I walked out of the triple locked door at APEX, I felt something other than relief: it was guilt.  I was reminded of the outside sources we looked at for our first cluster convo of the semester. I remembered one of the poem’s discussing how people come in and try to help like knights in shining armor and then they leave after they’ve fulfilled their need to give to others.  They leave the less fortunate people they were helping behind, convincing themselves that they’ve done all they can and then they move on without looking back.  I realized that I don’t know want to be like that.  It took volunteering at APEX to make me realize that volunteering a few times isn’t enough.  A true volunteer is someone who makes a commitment to help others throughout his or her life. It is my goal to be that person. 

Looking back at my first blog post, I discovered that most of my original ideas about volunteering at APEX have changed completely. I thought I’d be using my previous experience volunteering at a Boys and Girls Club to help me connect with the kids at the center.  Instead, I barely had any encounters with them other than typing their names and ages into data sheets.  I also expected to relate the violence at APEX to the violence in Shakespeare’s plays.  I thought I would get more specific with the theme of violence throughout each visit and each blog post.  But I learned that real life doesn’t always work that way. If I had written a paper about violence in Shakespeare, I would have easily been able to connect the two.  But I could not manipulate the results of my service learning, and learning that was part of the experience.  I had to accept that my connections between service learning and Shakespeare would change every time I went to the center. 

From cleaning out cabinets to typing in numbers, my work at APEX was not what I had expected.  However, it was a valuable experience that I’m glad I got the chance to have.  I still do not know the concrete connection between the center and Shakespeare, but I have some ideas. If I had to pick one it would be the differences in language, culture, and society that I witnessed while volunteering.  Shakespeare’s plays also demonstrate these differences in his wide range of characters.  Though we live in a much later era than Shakespeare, many of his themes still exist today. The language and culture of different societies in today's world, as well as in Shakespeare's plays, varies due to factors such as class and location. This is just one of many possible connections between Shakespeare and APEX. 

Post # 4- Alina Gordillo

          Since February I've been working in Girls Hope tutoring the girls in the house.  During my few months there I had a chance to work with all four girls multiple times.  Thankfully, I had the chance to work with all of them as individuals.  All of them worked differently and I had to slowly adapt to each one's personalities and also their way of learning.  As a whole they were kind and I could tell that they all treated each other as if they were sisters and they considered everyone that worked there part of their new family.  From the beginning I was told that the girls might consider you as a friend and talk to you about personal things and even invite you to dinner at the house.  In my last service learning one of the girls asked me to stay for dinner and I felt like I finally felt accomplished all of my goals for my service learning.

          In my Service Learning, I learned that beyond all I needed to be patient and understanding because not all of the girls will be kind and friendly towards you.  One of the girls did not particularly like me being around, so I kept it strictly as a tutor/student relationship.  The problem was that she usually prefers to work alone and when she needs help she is embarrassed to ask and sit down with someone that wants to help them.  I respected that and only went to her when she really needed help.  I made her laugh one time when I taught Macbeth to her.  Since she did not understand Shakespeare's language I explained the plot in modern day language and made it entertaining and she was laughing the whole way through.  She ended up getting an A+ on her test.  Topics about Shakespeare honestly didn't help me through this process, but better understanding his words, ideas, and characters truly helped me find a fun way to capture a young girls attention on his play.  This is one of my favorite memories from working with them.  Alongside, the Mexican girl that was ecstatic to know that my first language was Spanish and immediately invited me to her Quinceañera that she is already planning even though it's in 3 and a half years.  And the girl that asked me about my family and wanted to see pictures of them, we also read one of my favorite books together.  And the girl that I taught Spanish too who told me she finally understood Spanish thanks to me.

          Through my Service Learning and these five girls I grew as a person.  I was genuinely excited to go work there on Sundays because I was going to get to know them more and help them learn.  I also enjoyed that I was helping these girls grow as well.  I created different relationships with all of them.  Some consider me a friend.  One girl even asked me for advice about a boy that she really liked.  Some of them did not see me as just as a teacher, but some of them did and that was great too.  I could see how different they all work and each one of them helped me grow intellectually and personally.  This experience made want to work for this cause even more and hopefully I'll be able to tutor there again next semester. 

Reflections on Service Learning

     I think service learning at APEX resulted in three new prospectives for me. First, I think I began to understand how fragile and suspect to new environments social roles are. Second, I have gained a sense of the enormous social, cultural and economic barriers that exist not only race and class, but just different neighborhoods in a single city. Finally, I see how violence and status are two of the more intriguing issues because of their relation to gaining power by both the victims of violence and discrimination and those who marginalize others. These all relate to Shakespeare or have led me to question Shakespeare and his intentions.
     Working with students who for the most don't trust me and see me as an outsider, I had no control with how my relation to them would be established. When you volunteer at a youth center, you are under the impression that you will be an authority figure. However, if I did not put a focused effort into interjecting myself into the kids' conversations, they would make sure to isolate me. Whenever I was able to establish some type of authority, it would not last for very long. The flexibility of social roles is something Shakespeare played with a lot and I think working it a context where I had to observe my roles with people unfamiliar to myself and their roles with each other translated well. I was close to comparing the shifting roles and relationship in "Taming of the Shrew" and "Richard" because I thought the gender and authoritative roles have an interesting relationship, and I wanted to see if Shakespeare saw legitimate threats to such roles.
     Instead, I wanted to focus on violence and power. I saw a lot of confrontations this semester between kids and it was always interesting to see what is was over. Almost always,it revolved over credibility: either on the basketball court, over video games or what started as harmless flirting. Verbal violence was really common amongst the kids and they talked trash to each other to establish superiority over the other. There is some sad irony that a marginalized group with little "credential" to the rest of society values their credentials to each other to a point where they will fight each other. When I would try to talk down a fight, it was clear that I was basically speaking a foreign language. The words and slang they used made it nearly impossible to infiltrate their arguments. I enjoyed writing my paper on "Titus Andronicus" because the language Shakespeare uses does a good job showing how power and status relate and can come into conflict together. Overall, service learning helped me question how I read Shakespeare and what function his themes have in marginalized communities and how I relate to such places.

Shax and the real world

Knowing that Natalie and I have a theatre background, Shakespeare is assumed more so than needed to be told. When people hear theatre, often times Shakespeare is the first thing that comes to mind, although I have never been in a Shakespeare performance in my life, the assumptions are still made. I think Shakespeare resonates with a people. His name means knowledge and an elite status that causes instant recognition. Like AIDS, Shakespeare is an easily recognizable word in the minds of all. Never thought I’d be able to relate Shakespeare and AIDS until this class. However, both AIDS and Shakespeare are associated with a certain socio-economic status. AIDS being that of low class and dirty, while Shakespeare means upper crust and clean. AIDS also tells a story of how a person lived, and Shakespeare is the ultimate “story of our lives.” The major difference is this, Shakespeare wrote his plays over 400 years ago, and AIDS is in our faces now. We praise and revere history and ignore the present thereby damaging our future. Service Learning in this class allows us to focus on both.

            With service learning we are allowed to straddle the line that so many of us choose to ignore, no longer must we pick a side, but we can blend them and use one to benefit the other. We study wars throughout the history of Shakespeare, families killing each other for claims to the throne, and we ignore the wars that are in our faces everyday. We imagine ourselves in Shakespeare’s time and how brothers can kill one another and how funny the sexual innuendos are. However we live in a society that pushes sex down our throat by the age of seven and then ignore the by-product of teen pregnancy and STDs, AIDS included.

            We think of AIDS as almost as distant of a past as Shakespeare, and not on-going. I know too many people who think of AIDS as something they read in books that wiped out thousands like the bubonic plague and then just went away. Sure people can still, rarely, catch the plague now, just like people, rarely, catch AIDS. The pure level of ignorance on this subject is not only upsetting but mind-blowing.

            We are privileged enough to pay thousands of dollars to learn about William Shakespeare and his great works, but we don’t use that privilege to put the book down and fight a war that Shakespeare could only imagine.

            I truly believe Shakespeare, being a man of the people, would write about the people, using his influence to draw notice to this ongoing epidemic. We put Shakespeare on this pedestal, and forget the fact that he wrote for his day, he took issues of his time and put them into stories that everyone knew, he snuck the problem in there and gave it focus when it would typically be ignored. Shakespeare absolutely has a place in the real world, because he lived in the real world. It is us, who choose not to live in the real world any longer.  

Learning About & Learning With

          This past Tuesday, I had the distinct honor and surprise of being the first recipient of the Magis Award for Outstanding Achievement in Service Learning. This award is

presented (and will henceforth be presented annually) to an undergraduate

student who is judged by a service learning partner agency to have made

exceptional contributions to its mission and clients, and who is also judged

by a service learning professor to have made distinctive strides in

transformational learning and the ability to synthesize academic knowledge

with real world experience.  Because service learning combines service and

volunteer work with an academic course, this award requires at least two

nominations for every nominee: one from a service supervisor, and one from a

faculty member.

            I walked into the St. Charles room, where the award ceremony was to be held, and headed for the table with the pettifors. En route, I saw my boss from Project Lazarus, Jessica Kinnison, seated at a table, and I stopped in my tracks and nearly burst into excited tears. These tears had the opportunity to fully realize themselves as the director of Service Learning, Kelly Brotzman, began reading excerpts written by my nominators:

                        “She helped one resident build enough confidence to apply and be accepted to                           Café Reconcile's hospitality program.  Another resident planned and                                         performed in a talent show because [tonight's award winner] sang with her.                             The talent show turned out to be one of the best community-building events                           at Project Lazarus to date.  She helped another resident develop a more                                   positive relationship with his son through enhanced communications skills."

Never before had I heard someone describe my actions listed so eloquently as concrete accomplishments. “Moved” is an understatement. I had the revelation that what makes me feel good (as a teacher) is the payoff of enriched students. Undoubtedly, the richest opportunity Service Learning afforded me was the chance to not only learn about the residents at Project Lazarus but also learn with them. There is no way I could have foreseen the monumental impact Service Learning would have on me. Project Lazarus has been such a hugely formative part of my senior year that I decided to form the basis of my Fulbright application essay around my experiences there. I know my relationship with Project Lazarus is not over. In the third week of May, they will host the second Talent Show, and you better believe I will be there.

Taking a bow,

I love service learning, commitment to the outside community is one of the reasons I chose to come to school here 4 years ago and am pleased to see it being carried through even to my senior year. My placement was perfect. First I was nervous about it, my friend had already built relationships with so many of the residents at Project Lazarus that I thought it would be hard to build my own.  Also I was unsure how these relationships would foster with dealing with such a heavy topic of AIDS and HIV. All of my fears were quickly put to bed as I came to realize that not only did I belong here, but that the residents brought happiness to my Thursdays. I feel as though serving at Project Lazarus has opened up my compassion for people, my ability to open up to people, as well as my desire to tell people what they mean to me.

                I’ll start by explaining compassion. I have the ability to drop people out of my life and keep moving on. While I don’t see it as a negative thing, often times it makes me look past people in ways that aren’t rude, but don’t give people their due respect when interacting with them for an extended period of time. Because Project Lazarus is a traditional living house, most residents only stay for a maximum of two years, but they live in that moment and thrive with being around each other, that I can’t imagine seeing them apart. Next, seeing the residents share their stories and snow-balling off of each other and furthering their bond with each other was so beautiful to watch and truly let me know that you never know who’s story you might share, or what you can learn from someone else if you aren’t willing to share . Lastly the first day I started serving there, a former resident had just passed away, and while I was there another former resident had passed and several residents had moved in and out. Although I have had my own experiences with death, the looks on the other residents’ faces re affirmed that you never truly know what the future holds and you should always praise others and tell them what you feel. The residents never stopped thanking us for spending time with them or teaching them new games, that appreciation fueled my desire to do more and come back every week, even when school was wearing me down.

                I will absolutely continue to serve my community and I believe that I have found that one on one serving works best for me, to have a direct impact on someone’s life makes me the happiest, knowing that I had a conversation when someone just wanted to talk or helped pay a bill when someone couldn’t understand how fills me with such joy. Often I compare myself to others in materialistic things as well as friends or family units, but to know I have the ability to brighten up someone’s day and at the same time have them brighten up mine fills me with joy that no amount of friends or extended family members could replace.

                Choosing one memorable conversation is almost like picking a favorite child. They were all so important, but maybe the most important was when a resident came to me for help trying to figure out his credit score and later revealed that he came to me and me only, because he trusted me. To know that I had gained the trust of a much older white man in only a matter of weeks blew my mind and filled me with such pride, it made me know that what I was doing was all worth it and at the same time made me feel guilty that I wouldn’t be there longer or I couldn’t do more.

I could not have asked for a better service learning experience than the one I got working with Project Lazarus this semester.