“If someone is interested in speaking Spanish, and learning about Spanish-speaking cultures and Spanish-speaking peoples, I think it's absolutely necessary to engage directly with the people who speak Spanish, who live the experience of being a Spanish speaker, and in our case, a Spanish speaker living in Western North Carolina,” said Michelle Bettencourt, associate chair and associate professor of Spanish at UNC Asheville.
So that’s what her students do. Everyone in her Spanish 300: Oral Skills service-learning course—which is everyone who completes the Spanish major or minor at UNC Asheville—takes their skills and curiosity out into the community to engage, serve, and learn. Many students spend time at a local YMCA afterschool program, or go into classrooms and support teachers in ESL classes. Others have served at Pisgah Legal Services or Conserving Carolina.
The COVID-19 pandemic narrowed the opportunities for safe community engagement last year, but that didn’t stop Bettencourt and her students. Fall of 2020 found them at the weekly markets hosted by Bounty and Soul, a local non-profit that provides local produce, plant-based food and health and wellness resources. During the pandemic Bounty and Soul created a car line for their weekly markets, allowing folks to safely drive through, open their trunks, and have a volunteer place a box of healthy produce inside. But veggies weren’t all that was on the menu. Bettencourt’s students were working with Hola Carolina to help members of the Spanish-speaking community complete the 2020 Census.
“We would have one volunteer over at the car line at the food market asking every car that went by—which for each market could be around 200 people—have you completed the census?” Bettencourt said. Those who had not yet filled out the census could pull over to where Bettencourt’s students, who were trained to fill out the census for both English and Spanish speakers, were waiting to assist. “I found that most people in the organization collecting the census did not speak Spanish, so the fact that my students were willing to do that and able to do that really stood out.”
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