The Connections Goal Area in Spanish Community Service-Learning: Possibilities and Limitations

Using the National Standards' 5 C's as a framework, the authors examine student success in Spanish community service-learning at making connections across academic disciplines, to information and viewpoints that they encounter in the community, and to concrete social action. We use data from students, instructors, and community partners involved in a community service-learning Spanish course to present three cases: a student who made connections and took action, another who could not make connections beyond her own experience vis-a-vis the concept of poverty, and one representative case of a student who excelled as a student in every traditional context yet did not take action.