Service Learning at Joyce Preschool
Guest writer Eun Joo, PhD Candidate at the University of Minnesota, shares her experience at Joyce Preschool as a service learning site.
I first came to learn about Joyce Preschool while preparing to teach a service-learning course at the University of Minnesota last fall. I was impressed with what I was learning through the Community Service-Learning Center on campus and with the staff at Joyce, and I decided to include this program as one of several possible community sites for my students. Joyce was a popular choice among my students. Over the entire semester, my students who had committed to working with Joyce were enthusiastic about their engagement with early literacy and bilingual education. In sharing their experiences, my students helped enrichen our class discussions and broadened our collective understanding of literacy, as the majority of our class had been working with youth and adult literacy programs.
While the course lasted just a single semester, I was eager to continue my own education of literacy concerns and I decided to volunteer this spring and summer. As I had grown up bilingual myself (and having encountered my own obstacles with language), I also had personal investments in supporting Joyce Preschool. In the past several months, I have been challenged to rethink my conceptions of classroom education, encouraged to learn about ways to introduce literacy practices at a young age, and have thoroughly enjoyed singing, playing, and learning with the students.
As I am currently finishing up my doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota, I am so glad to have had a chance to work with the students, teachers, and staff at Joyce. My time at Joyce offers a welcome break from my other research and teaching commitments. As I begin making plans for my next steps, I am actively looking for further opportunities to include service engagement in the college-level courses I will teach at other schools and campuses. In many ways, Joyce has been an important part of my teaching, learning, and community engagement. In the meantime, I look forward to continuing to help prepare the 4- and 5-year-old students before they move on to kindergarten!