In the hedge garden near the Arbol del Tule in Santa María del Tule, Oaxaca, Mexico (the tree of Tule is in the background behind the hedge).

Author: Terrell Page | Major: English Education | Semester: Summer 2023

I’m Terrell Page, and I’m a senior Honors College Fellow. I’m majoring in English Education in the College of Education and Health Professions. I took the Faculty-Led program, “Service Learning in Puebla, Mexico” in summer 2023.

Because I had never left the United States before (and therefore had little to no idea how to live abroad), I wanted to travel with a group in a faculty-led program. My options for faculty-led programs focused on the Spanish language were Mexico and Spain. I chose the Mexico program because not only did I need credit for my Spanish minor, but I also wanted to get more familiar with the language and culture of many of my future students. I plan to teach English in the US, so many of my Latinx students will have heritage from Latin America, not Spain (the dialects and cultures are very different). This was the best program to satisfy both my language-learning interests and my career interests.

UARK students in the Education track had a student teaching internship every morning at the Hermanos Serdán public elementary school and took classes at the UPAEP (Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla) in the afternoon. For our university classes, one instructor dove deep into the history and politics of the Mexican educational system but was only given to us for the first week. The other instructor (our main instructor for the whole 5 weeks) taught us more about Spanish grammar, school-related vocabulary and the present and future of the Mexican educational system. I learned that things like Bloom’s Taxonomy, learning styles, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are becoming common parlance in Mexican pedagogy just as they have been in the US. I also learned that the funding gap between public and private schools in K-12 is vast.

At the morning internships, I helped my mentor teacher with whatever lessons she was teaching that day: Spanish, math, history, geography, socioemotional learning, and science. I became an extra set of hands to grade assignments and an extra set of eyes to see students who needed individual help. For the first two weeks of my internship, a brilliant Mexican intern also helped in the class. He was there as part of his university internship in hopes of getting a teaching job someday.

I assumed that part of the UARK internship included teaching the children English, so I asked my mentor teacher if I could teach the class some English during the week. She agreed to give me a block of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays after recess. (This was a strategic move on her part–although teaching children anything after they’ve eaten and run around a bit is notoriously difficult, she knew that their curiosity about me and about English made student motivation a non-issue.) This turned out to be an optional part of the program, and it was harder than I thought. I was confident in my ability to speak and understand Spanish, but doing so while a class of 28 fourth-graders all asked me questions at once was tough. They talked faster than what I was used to. I didn’t understand all the slang they used. They also wore masks to protect themselves from the nearby ash volcano, Popocatepétl, making communication a little more difficult. It felt frustrating to not understand or be understood, but I realized that I hadn’t experienced that in a while because I hadn’t pushed myself to my linguistic limits. The students were patient with me whenever I couldn’t quite remember what word I was looking for in Spanish, but I knew enough to get to know every student. I learned some LSM (Mexican Sign Language) as well as spoken Spanish from them during our lessons. We all laughed when I said “terco” (one of many ways to say “lazy”) instead of “tercio” (“third”) while teaching fractions, mistakenly calling the number 3 lazy. They tried to teach me the lyrics to “Ella Baila Sola” by Peso Pluma as an incentive for them to finish one of their assignments, but I think I butchered it.

While we had fun in the class, we also worked hard. Using what I had learned from COEHP, I created English lessons that drew on the students’ knowledge of Spanish and their love of games and the arts. In my lesson on colors, we played a game where I passed around an item (a tote bag, a towel, a pencil, etc.) as a manipulative, something to touch. Everyone who touched the item said its color in Spanish and in English and then passed it on. The next person did the same until we reached the end of the room. Towards the end of the lesson, each student completed a handmade brain teaser about the vocabulary. If they got something wrong, I simply sent them back with a hint. After that class, I often referred to items in the classroom by their English colors (as a review) in casual Spanish conversation and pretended I didn’t know what the Spanish color was. The students remembered the English color, told me, and then I dropped my ruse. There were many more lessons like this, and I’m now more confident in my teaching ability because of it.

Outside of class, the food was amazing (though sometimes we all needed Pepto-Bismol), the weekend trips were exciting, and the people were nice! I’ll never forget that lucha libre match we saw or how scary it was to climb up those pyramids, though. I do not know much about the other tracks of the program, but I would highly recommend this program to Education majors who speak Spanish at a near-advanced level. (An advanced level here will be “just enough to get by” there.)