The University of Arizona Press
September 10, 2024
Focusing on service-learning and Latina/o/e communities within a variety of institutional contexts, Working en comunidad: Service-Learning and Community Engagement with U.S. Latinas/os/es provides a practical framework grounded in theoretical approaches that center Latina/o/e experiences as foundational to understanding how to prepare students to work in the community and en comunidad.
We recently had a chance to interview editor and author Elena Foulis about the book, asking about the origin of the project, the concept of comunidad, and the benefits of service-learning.
Your work, and the work of the contributors in this book, provides a guide to service-learning that is both ethical and reciprocal. How did you come to see that there was a need for this kind of guide?
As a growing population, there is an increased interest to interact and learn about Latina/o/e communities, yet it typically tends to be brief, during a semester, or rather extractive, whether this is intentional or not. In the past two decades, more and more academic programs across the U.S. want to work with Latina/o/e communities, and as someone that identifies as part of this community and who has engaged with these communities with my students for over a decade, I wanted to offer a set of best practices to understand how to work with and in community with such a complex and diverse group.
Comunidad is a central, unifying concept for this book. How did you and the other editors formulate this idea?
When we (all of us editors and authors in this book) think of service-learning, we think of comunidad— there is no other ethical way to do this. Service-learning is reciprocal, mutually beneficial, and should lead to sustainable practices. Seeing communities as integral, long-term collaborators requires that we spend time with each other to develop a respectful and trusting relationship. This is what comunidad is all about! A coming together to build unity and work together to build a better future for us and the generations that come after us.
In Chapter 1, you lay out the importance of cultural humility and empathy as part of the pedagogical preparation for service-learning. You employ the wonderful phrase “listening to understand.” Can you talk about what that means, or what it looks like?
As scholars and students, we can think that our textbook or academic knowledge about a community makes us experts of their issues, but we are not. We have an educated understanding that is true and necessary, but we must be humble in our approach to working with communities outside of our institutions. Communities understand their needs and the structural systems that have prevented them from accessing resources, so our job is to listen. As a Latina, I don’t have all the answers about my own community, because we have different experiences, so we must teach ourselves and our students to listen to their concerns and to the solutions that work best for them. In this interaction, our book knowledge takes a back seat, and we become “vulnerable observers,” as anthropologist Ruth Behar puts it.
What are some of the benefits or changes you’ve seen among students, educators, and community members who participate in the kind of service-learning this book advocates for?
Well, students never forget these classes. It is often the only service-learning class they’ve ever taken, so I regularly hear back from them to tell me what they are doing or how the class led them into non-profit work, law, education, and medical school because they want to continue to work—within their chosen professions—in the community. There really is much care among community organizations, students and educators, and those who are served by the organizations. I get to see real changes, joy, and empathy for all involved in this work. Just this year, I heard about how much my students are having a positive impact working with an organization that serves adult learners. They often asked when students would be back, because they’d had such a great rapport with them.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a monograph on oral history with Latina/o/e communities. I developed my passion for service-learning and oral history almost at the same time. The tentative title is Embodied Encounters: Bilingual Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences. I also have several articles coming out on Latina/o/e digital humanities, translanguaging and trauma-informed oral history.
Elena Foulis is an assistant professor and program director of Spanish Language Studies at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. She has directed the oral history project Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio since 2014. Foulis’s research explores Latina/o/e voices through oral history and performance, identity and place, ethnography, and family. She has more than ten years of experience in service-learning pedagogy.
