“I want to find a way to document what students are really getting out of this.”
“All of us perceive anecdotally how much students learn in the Summer Study in Ecuador Program, how much they grow, and how important this program is,” says Assistant Visiting Professor of Spanish Jane Hardy.
“I want to find a way to document what students are really getting out of this.”
Hardy’s work as assistant director of the program gives her the opportunity to do exactly that. She requires daily journal and regular blog entries plus an exit interview with standardized questions and thorough follow-up. Her research is beginning to record how the four-week experience in Ecuador is enriching the Wabash education. And she believes adding volunteer teaching and work projects reveal an essential ingredient in language learning.
“When you do service work, you’re no longer a foreign observer—you’re actively participating in the community,” Hardy says. “It affects the way you view the people, and you get a much richer cultural experience.”
As a linguist who specializes in how people acquire a second language, Hardy is most interested in the students’ improvement in language skills.
“Doing service projects, you’re using language in a different way,” she explains. “Students tend to get good at ordering food in restaurants, bargaining in the market, getting a taxi, but that’s a relatively simple set of language skills.
“If you want to move up to a higher level of proficiency, you have to be forced to use the language in
different contexts. That’s what they get when they’re involved in community or service projects. I believe now that that results in sharper gains in language proficiency.”
In fact, Hardy now recommends service or volunteer work to those studying abroad for a semester.
“I’ve started telling them to get some kind of internship or volunteer work, and to make sure they choose a program that will assist in finding something that gets them directly involved in community activity with other people in the culture.”
Interviewing Ecuador program students, Hardy also discovered a cultural empathy and desire to live out the College’s mission in small ways that didn’t always turn up in the journal entries.
“I asked them to identify moments that had a big effect on them, and one student recalled seeing a mother and a little girl sitting by the road,” Hardy says. “There was an open soda bottle lying on the side of the road; the little girl walked over, saw it had some liquid left in it, and drank what was left in the bottle. The mother just sat and watched this. But the student was shocked. He went into the nearest store, bought a soda, took it out and gave it to the girl.
“It’s a small thing, perhaps,” Hardy says. “Or perhaps not.”