Service Learning Abroad: Local Advocacy in Nicaragua
Service learning at Simmons was not limited to local engagement. The first course formally designated as a “service learning” class, “IDS228 Service Learning in Nicaragua,” was an intensive 4-credit undergraduate course which took place over winter break. The Nicaragua Service Learning trip, coordinated by Professor David Gullette, ran from 2002-2009. Now Professor Emeritus, David Gullette served as the vice president of the Newton (MA)/San Juan del Sur Sister City Project, and had worked in Nicaragua for over two decades when he began coordinating IDS228.
Over the years the course took various forms, but was always characterized by a period of preparatory study in the fall semester, followed by two to three weeks in San Juan del Sur living with families, performing community service, and conducting research and interviews for a final synthetic paper. It was often conducted in tandem with physical therapy doctoral students’ service learning trips, and NUR240: Community Clinical Elective, Field Experience in Cross-Cultural Health Care in Nicaragua.
Areas of community services included medical (water testing, nutrition, physical therapy, and nursing), arts at the library, teaching english at the library, construction (BioSand Filters, EcoFogones, and composting toilets), girls’ soccer, veterinary medicine, art therapy, and advocacy work with local feminist organization “La Casa de la Mujer.” During their time in Nicaragua, students were expected not only to work, but to “[ask] the people [they] work with and live with lots of questions about what their lives are like and what they will be like after [they] leave.”
Prior to their departure, students were expected to have fluency in conversational Spanish, and Professor Gullette would share details of the host families and their lodgings in an email to participants. As part of the course curriculum, students were assigned to write an anticipatory piece about their expectations for the experience:
“Bring to the SEPT 13th meeting an account of your first few days in San Juan, as you imagine they will be. Paint a verbal picture of what you think your first impressions of Nicaragua will be– the people (especially the family you’ll be living with), the landscape, the housing, the poverty, the food, the smell and sounds and FEEL of San Juan del Sur, the dynamics of this fishing/farming/tourism town. The idea is to get down on paper all your fantasies and presuppositions about what your experience will be like, before it happens.”
Upon returning from the trip, students wrote a service learning reflection paper, dispelling their pre-trip fantasies. The final paper also included a “SWOT” analysis of the student’s community service site, describing the “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats” facing the people and organization where they worked. “The combination of hands-on community service and intellectual rigor makes the Nicaragua experience a model for international service learning” (Gullette).
