Coming Full Circle: A Service Learning Story

We’ve all experienced how small and large actions can have massive impacts on the lives of others. While the scale of such impacts is rarely fully understood, sometimes glimpses of those successes can be seen.

For decades, service learning courses have been offered at UNO to foster relationships between the university and community partners with the mission of improving the quality of life on a local, national, and global level.

Just one of the hundreds of courses UNO has offered in that time was first launched in 2014 by Associate Professor Sandra Rodriguez-Arroyo, D. Ed., and Anne O’ Hara, director of Learning Community Center of South Omaha’s (LCCSO). Over the past seven years, UNO’s “Introduction to Teaching English as a Second Language” service-learning course has used collaborative learning experiences to support families in South Omaha in learning about higher education.

Through the course, UNO students partner with LCCSO to regularly connect with families from South Omaha, most of whom are immigrant parents with children. The goal is to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) concepts and teaching strategies to UNO students that can, in turn, be used to assist families as they begin college planning while providing them exposure to a university setting. The course also gives future ESL teacher candidates experience in working with Latino families in a professional setting.

“I like my students to reframe their whole perspective and not think about ‘helping’ the families,” Rodriguez-Arroyo said.” We're here to provide a particular education to supplement. It's a service, it’s a service-learning course. It's not a helping course. It is [also] not community service because my students are also learning.”

After participating in the program as a high school student, and learning about college from former UNO teacher candidates, current junior Gabbi Calderon decided to take the same course and is now experiencing things from the teacher candidates’ point of view.

“I was a sophomore in high school, and I had never seen the campus before. It was an eye-opening experience because back then it was more of a college prep program and because of that I understood the meaning of grants, loans, and scholarships,” Calderon said. “Everyone tells me how it’s so full circle and it’s so true because I remember the two college students who were assigned to my family showing me Roskens because I told them I wanted to become a teacher and now I’m taking the same class as them years later.”

As a teacher candidate herself, Calderon is supporting families who are doing college preparation as well as learning about wellness, technology, and more, under the guidance of Rodriguez-Arroyo and Andrea Karpf, Ed.D., an instructor in the Department of Teacher Education.

“She [Rodriguez-Arroyo] gives us a lot of creative freedom to create activities for our families the way we know best because not all families are the same and each are at a different language level,” Calderon said. “I’ve learned a lot about them... which will help me later on when I become a teacher since I’ll probably like to stay here and teach in South Omaha.”

For Calderon, her story of how she came to UNO is just one of dozens of stories that show the impact of the support families receive through just one service learning course.

For O’Hara, who was able to find a partner in UNO seven years ago, it shows the importance of taking that first step to seek out service learning opportunities, because that initial quest has led to something not just impactful but also sustainable.

“The most exciting part of the project is just happening now, as the children from our center are now college-age and choosing to continue with their education. Two of our center's previous participants are currently becoming teachers at UNO. That makes all the work we put into this project over the years worthwhile.”

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Interested in incorporating service learning into your own course? Learn more about UNO's Service Learning Faculty Fellows or reach out to the Service Learning Academy directly to get started.