JAPN320S: ADVANCED JAPANESE SERVICE LEARNING
Course Description: "This course gives students opportunity to deepen their knowledge of Japanese language and culture through their community service and to develop communication skills through discussions, reflection essays and presentations. Taught in Japanese."
Service Learning Site: Highland Elementary
MLOs addressed in this course:
- MLO 1: Japanese Language and Communication
- MLO 2: Japanese Culture
- MLO 3: Secondary Culture Other Than Japanese
- MLO 4: Research & Technology
Service learning was a valuable experience for me because it allowed me to get practical experience in an area that I was originally unfamiliar in. I'll be teaching in Japan this upcoming July so I truly treasured this experience as a whole since it gave me teaching experience with children in grades 1-5. My service learning experience involved not only getting 30 hours of community service at Highland Elementary school, but also doing classroom work that augmented the classroom experience.
The workload for service learning was tough, but each part of the class helped me to further understand what it means to be a teacher and offer my services to the community. Before starting our actual community service hours, we surveyed the area around the school and took in the details of the community in our community scan project. We learned about the demographics of the area, it's economic situation, and how these things influence the school as a whole. We also had to do supplementary reading reflections, and were tasked with taking one of the readings and creating a presentation based off of it. For our actual community service, we were tasked with creating lesson plans that each represented a different aspect of Japanese culture or language that we could teach to the children. We had a relatively young group of students so we attempted to keep the lessons fun and simple. For example, we made onigiri with the students and also taught them about numbers and colors. After each service learning session (ten in total), we wrote reflections about how each lesson went and what we could do to improve the next week. The site reflections were written in Japanese and were probably the most difficult part of the course outside of the readings. They not only made us rely on using our previous Japanese knowledge, but we had to now use more vocabulary tailored to the teaching experience as a whole. The lessons not only allowed us to relearn things about Japanese culture that we may had previously forgot, but it allowed us to research and teach it in new ways and methods.
In terms of social responsibility, I believe that we as college students have a duty to give back to the communities around us. These students may have never had a chance to learn about Japanese culture or have an experience that allowed them to become interested in it. I truly believe that in our society issues of poverty and injustice at public schools aren't talked about as much as they need to be. Children who need secondary language education don't get the help that they need. Many of the students needed help with their homework because they couldn't get the help at home or because they primarily spoke Spanish. I'm glad that we could give the students the opportunity to learn about Japan, but also help them in the areas that CPY may not have been able to cover all the time. While our school had a primarily Hispanic student population, learning Japanese in the classroom allowed me to not only teach them about Japanese culture, but for them to reflect on the similarities and differences between Japanese culture and their own. We used their backgrounds to augment our lessons, and that made the lessons more relatable to many of the students. In terms of what I learned, my time with these kids allowed me to learn more about their lives in 10 weeks than I believed possible. Many of the children came from poorer families and had parents that didn't speak English. I felt like these kids were my own students by the end of this experience, and it pained me to say goodbye to them on our last day. I want to see these kids succeed and go far in their respective school journeys. I hope that this experience allowed them to open up to Japanese culture and make them interested in the language for their futures.
Jovon Hutchins - Community Scan Project (Google Slides) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Reading Reflections (Google Docs) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Reading Presentation (Google Slides) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Lesson Plan (Google Slides) | (Word Document)
Jovon Hutchins - Service Learning Mid-term Presentation (Google Slides) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Service Learning Final Presentation (Google Slides) | (PDF)
Service Learning Site: Highland Elementary
MLOs addressed in this course:
- MLO 1: Japanese Language and Communication
- MLO 2: Japanese Culture
- MLO 3: Secondary Culture Other Than Japanese
- MLO 4: Research & Technology
Service learning was a valuable experience for me because it allowed me to get practical experience in an area that I was originally unfamiliar in. I'll be teaching in Japan this upcoming July so I truly treasured this experience as a whole since it gave me teaching experience with children in grades 1-5. My service learning experience involved not only getting 30 hours of community service at Highland Elementary school, but also doing classroom work that augmented the classroom experience.
The workload for service learning was tough, but each part of the class helped me to further understand what it means to be a teacher and offer my services to the community. Before starting our actual community service hours, we surveyed the area around the school and took in the details of the community in our community scan project. We learned about the demographics of the area, it's economic situation, and how these things influence the school as a whole. We also had to do supplementary reading reflections, and were tasked with taking one of the readings and creating a presentation based off of it. For our actual community service, we were tasked with creating lesson plans that each represented a different aspect of Japanese culture or language that we could teach to the children. We had a relatively young group of students so we attempted to keep the lessons fun and simple. For example, we made onigiri with the students and also taught them about numbers and colors. After each service learning session (ten in total), we wrote reflections about how each lesson went and what we could do to improve the next week. The site reflections were written in Japanese and were probably the most difficult part of the course outside of the readings. They not only made us rely on using our previous Japanese knowledge, but we had to now use more vocabulary tailored to the teaching experience as a whole. The lessons not only allowed us to relearn things about Japanese culture that we may had previously forgot, but it allowed us to research and teach it in new ways and methods.
In terms of social responsibility, I believe that we as college students have a duty to give back to the communities around us. These students may have never had a chance to learn about Japanese culture or have an experience that allowed them to become interested in it. I truly believe that in our society issues of poverty and injustice at public schools aren't talked about as much as they need to be. Children who need secondary language education don't get the help that they need. Many of the students needed help with their homework because they couldn't get the help at home or because they primarily spoke Spanish. I'm glad that we could give the students the opportunity to learn about Japan, but also help them in the areas that CPY may not have been able to cover all the time. While our school had a primarily Hispanic student population, learning Japanese in the classroom allowed me to not only teach them about Japanese culture, but for them to reflect on the similarities and differences between Japanese culture and their own. We used their backgrounds to augment our lessons, and that made the lessons more relatable to many of the students. In terms of what I learned, my time with these kids allowed me to learn more about their lives in 10 weeks than I believed possible. Many of the children came from poorer families and had parents that didn't speak English. I felt like these kids were my own students by the end of this experience, and it pained me to say goodbye to them on our last day. I want to see these kids succeed and go far in their respective school journeys. I hope that this experience allowed them to open up to Japanese culture and make them interested in the language for their futures.
Jovon Hutchins - Community Scan Project (Google Slides) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Reading Reflections (Google Docs) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Reading Presentation (Google Slides) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Lesson Plan (Google Slides) | (Word Document)
Jovon Hutchins - Service Learning Mid-term Presentation (Google Slides) | (PDF)
Jovon Hutchins - Service Learning Final Presentation (Google Slides) | (PDF)