Breaking language barriers through service
Every Thursday afternoon from 3-4 p.m., students and staff members fill room 1120 in the TCU Human Resources building.
Within minutes, the room is filled with chatter in English and Spanish.
The staff members, a mix of custodians, groundskeepers and housekeepers, aren’t there to work. They are there to learn.
The students are there to teach and learn.
The weekly class is Service Learning in the Latino Community. Students learn how to work with and assist people from different backgrounds by tutoring employees whose first language is Spanish so they can improve their English.
“The class enhances the student who is a major or minor in Spanish to also engage in that instructional component from an adult education perspective,” said Susie Olmos-Soto, the manager of employee engagement and learning in the TCU Human Resources department. “It’s all student-led. I love that our students are engaging in this class in such a meaningful way.”
12.9% of Tarrant County residents do not have their high school diploma. (Perrin Gilman)
12.9% of Tarrant County residents do not have their high school diploma. (Perrin Gilman)
The student tutors are also helping the employees prepare for the General Education Development test so they can obtain their State of Texas Certificate of High School Equivalency.
The high school equivalency test measures the four standard high school subjects: language arts, math, social studies and science. Anyone who is 16 or older and has not completed high school can take the test.
The origins
The tutor sessions evolved from a 2018 honors communicating effectively course, where five students served as conversation partners for Latino employees to help them strengthen their English-speaking skills.
“From that class, we were able to incorporate conversation partners for the students who were learning Spanish, and the employees learning English,” Olmos-Soto said.
Service Learning in the Latino Community launched in 2009 by Mary McKinney. That version served Latino residents in the Fort Worth community.
After McKinney retired in the spring of 2020, María Ciriza and Esther Teixeira took on the class. They were joined by Olmos-Soto.
As the pandemic waned, they regrouped and decided to scale back and focus on the TCU community. The trio saw an opportunity to provide TCU Latino employees with student-led tutor sessions to help them earn their GED.
The tutor sessions have been part of the curriculum for Service Learning in the Latino Community since the spring of 2021.
The employees set aside their own time in the midst of their work and family schedules to attend the tutor sessions.
“We have employees here who are either working a first shift or a second shift,” Olmos-Soto said. “Second shift employees, if they are here for a 3 p.m. class, don’t finish their job until midnight or 12:30 a.m. It makes for a long day.”
As of 2022, Tarrant County has a Hispanic population of 630,000 residents. 20.9% of those residents speak Spanish. 18,995 residents are from El Salvador. (Perrin Gilman)
As of 2022, Tarrant County has a Hispanic population of 630,000 residents. 20.9% of those residents speak Spanish. 18,995 residents are from El Salvador. (Perrin Gilman)
Mayra Aguilar is originally from El Salvador and has lived in Texas for 14 years. She works for the TCU Facility Services team as a custodian cleaning non-residential buildings, such those that house the Neeley School of Business and TCU Human Resources.
Aguilar said she wanted to learn English because she lives and works in an English-speaking environment.
She began participating in the tutor sessions when they first started around four years ago.
Aguilar’s tutors are Stacey Gomez, a bilingual senior triple majoring in strategic communication, communication studies and Spanish, and Jake Rogers, a junior double majoring in political science and Spanish for business professions.
Since Gomez learned Spanish at home and Rogers learned it through school, she said they make a good tutor team.
The sessions
Gomez and Rogers create lesson plans that align with Aguilar’s academic interests, including past tense verb conjugation and the historical significance of President John F. Kennedy.
The main goal of their tutor sessions is to bridge the gap between Aguilar’s speaking and writing skills. Such skills build upon each other as oral language lays the groundwork for developing better writing.
The first half of the tutor session focuses on conversational skills and the other half focuses on writing skills.
Gomez and Rogers create lesson plans for Aguilar. (Gomez and Rogers)
At the beginning of each tutor session, Gomez and Rogers begin by catching up with each other in Spanish.
“We naturally drift the conversation to English and then we start our lesson,” Rogers said. “This makes our participant more comfortable with speaking English and is a low stakes way to warm up.”
Gomez and Rogers encourage Aguilar to use past tense verbs while speaking English. The three of them engage in a conversation where they share events from their past weeks.
Gomez said they ask Aguilar a series of questions, such as “How was your week? How was your weekend? What did you do?” and ask her to respond in English.
“We would share about our past weeks, as well, so it’s not just her sharing,” Gomez said. “We built up rapport with her because she got to know about our lives, and we got to know about hers.”
After they talk about their weeks, they transition into writing exercises.
During one of their lesson plans, Gomez said that she and Rogers wrote incomplete sentences on the whiteboard and asked Aguilar to write the correct past tense verb in the blank.
“She told us that she was struggling with past tense verbs,” Gomez said. “In that lesson plan, we saw that she knew a lot more than she thought. If she tries and takes her time, she can actually understand the whole lesson.”
Aguilar said the tutor sessions have helped her grow her English skills.
“Now I speak more,” she said. “I am not shy. It’s a blessing.”
She said she even told her friends about the tutor sessions and encouraged them to attend.
The impact
Ciriza is the professor of record for the class this semester. After the hour-long tutor sessions, she teaches a 90-minute lecture to discuss the positive impacts of service-learning.
She said that Rosangela Boyd, the director of service-learning and academic initiatives, has been an integral part in developing the best structure for the course.
By incorporating a lecture after the tutor sessions, the program excels in hands-on service as well as reflective learning.
The student tutors learn about intercultural competence, which is the ability to respectfully communicate and work with people from different cultural backgrounds.
“Sometimes, we frame it as an understanding of foreign languages and foreign cultures, but we don’t look into the domestic Latino community as a community that we also need to gain awareness of and their language barriers,” Ciriza said. “I think that when my students are put in the place of teaching a second language, they understand how difficult the process is.”
Ciriza walks around the classroom and checks in on different groups during the tutor sessions. (Perrin Gilman)
Jocelyn García, a sophomore student tutor who is bilingual and double majoring in marketing and Latin American studies, said the class has allowed her to see the impact it has on the employees from a service-perspective.
“Through this class, I am gaining a deeper understanding of how the employees really dedicate themselves and set time apart to come to the tutor sessions in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of the materials,” she said. “Service is doing something for someone else, but also meeting in the middle and working together.”
García’s tutor partner, Vinisha Inaganti, a senior neuroscience major minoring in Spanish for health professions, is a student tutor who is proficient in Spanish.
“The employees seeing my Spanish might not be perfect lets them know that at least I’m trying in some way,” she said. “It makes them feel comfortable knowing it’s okay if they make a mistake speaking English because I’ve probably done the same.”
The class transformed Ingnati’s understanding of service.
“Service is a weird thing,” she said. “It’s like a hierarchical system where you’re the person helping and the employees are the people being helped.”
In one of their lectures, the class discussed how the hierarchical system of service can cause the employees to be intimidated or afraid to get help.
“It’ll never be that you’re on the same level field as the employees because then service wouldn’t be needed,” Inganti said. “But, how do you find ways to make them feel like you’re at the same level as them?”
To combat the tutor-employee dynamic, she said that she and García would rearrange their seating during the tutor sessions. This action — small, yet effective — allows them to foster a more collaborative environment with the employees.
Through this class, Ciriza and her students shine a light on a community that needs recognition.
“We see workers at TCU kind of… We don’t see them,” Ciriza said. “They are invisible to us. We don’t realize who is behind doing all of this beautiful landscaping and maintaining all of these clean buildings.”
This class makes an invisible community visible where the employees are recognized beyond their jobs; they are recognized as language learners from different races, backgrounds and social classes.
Service Learning in the Latino Community is not just about teaching TCU Spanish-speaking employees English; it is about fostering a cultural understanding among the TCU Latino community and beyond.
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