Volunteering finds its way from the classroom into the community

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EL PASO — The concept of volunteer work is evolving rapidly within higher education as a relatively new idea called service learning, which transforms book learning into hands-on work in the community. According to Campus Compact, a national coalition of public and community service organizations, 44 per cent of college students participated in some form of volunteer work during the 2011-2012 academic year, an estimated $9.7 billion worth of service to their communities. Hector Garza, a junior studying political science at the University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg, Texas, describes service learning as early career training for a college student. He explained that “service learning actually gives you the opportunity take it to the community and actually see what you are learning and how it comes to life.”

Service learning takes place worldwide impacting millions of students and communities. This past April, 1, 400 high school students, college professors, teachers, and non profit representatives from the U.S. and other countries gathered at the 26th Annual Service Learning Conference in Washington, D.C.

The Monumental Conference, as it was named, offered many 90-minute workshops to sharpen and educate attendees about service learning with tools, resources, and ideas to better serve their communities.

A moment from my interview with Dr. Josefina Tinajero (right) on October 12, 2012, at Education Building, UTEP. (Herman Delgado/Social Justice Initiative)

Building Bridges: Internship at Media Changemakers shows me a way to connect the academy and the community

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Just change: media, stories, and actions

By Moushumi Biswas

EL PASO – As a journalist-turned-academic, I was at a vantage point last fall when I decided to intern with the Media Changemakers (MCM) as its Media and Communication Specialist. On the one hand I was an outsider, a media professional who had years of experience in communicating with the community as a reporter and photojournalist; on the other, I was looking at the community from the point of view of the academy. Thus, I was able to straddle both sides as I worked with the MCM, an interventional platform of the Social Justice Initiative (SJI) of the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Communication. Dr. Lucia Durá was my mentor and Dr. Arvind Singhal and Bobby Gutierrez, my co-mentors. This internship was part of my Community Literacy Internship service-learning class, which I took in the fall as part of my doctoral coursework in Rhetoric and Composition.