UNCA Spanish Students Volunteer at Local Hispanic Newspaper

UNC Asheville’s Spanish 310 students honed their Spanish speaking, writing and reading skills this spring while helping out the region’s new Hispanic newspaper El Eco de las Montanas.

Alice Weldon, UNCA assistant professor of foreign languages and instructor for the course, required students to volunteer six hours at El Eco during the semester. "The students’ participation at El Eco seemed to be a good fit academically because of the emphasis on grammar and writing in my course," said Weldon. "It was also a way for students to experience the real world importance of what they would be studying in the traditional classroom way. And I wanted students to become more aware of how big our local Spanish-speaking community is and to discover new ways of interacting with this community."

Service learning is a key factor of UNCA’s mission. Through class projects and the university’s Key Center for Service Learning, students are encouraged to integrate community service into their academic experience. Each year more than 1,000 UNCA students, faculty and staff volunteer in the community.

"Service learning is extremely important to what we do in the classroom because it gives us a chance to apply what we learn. Specifically, in a language class, the opportunity to be involved with a living, changing, culturally-connected language adds greatly to whatever we are able to do in the classroom, lab and even study abroad," said Weldon.

Junior environmental studies major Laura Dlugolecki spent extra hours typing and editing articles in Spanish during the semester and plans to help out more this summer. "My experience working at El Eco was really great. The entire staff was open to all our ideas and allowed the students to get very involved," said Dlugolecki. "It was great practice for my Spanish speaking, writing and reading skills while helping me get more involved in the community."

Weldon makes service learning a part of the Spanish and humanities courses she teaches each semester. Her goal is to not only apply learning outside the classroom but to also close the gap between students and the communities around them. "I feel really fortunate to be at an institution whose mission specifically, repeatedly and intentionally reflects that kind of concern as well," she said.

No stranger to community service, Weldon has served as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients at the Buncombe County Health Center, tutored a Hispanic student at Emma Elementary, served on the board of the Asheville Latin Americans for Advancement Society and worked with coordinating Fiesta Latina. She hoped that her class involvement would help the fledgling paper get off to a good start in the community. The students as well as the El Eco editorial staff agreed that the involvement was a success and Weldon plans to continue this particular student-community connection next year.

"Students helped with community promotion, advertising, copy editing, data entry, fundraising, event organizing, distribution and much more," said Sharon Bigger, El Eco’s volunteer coordinator and member of the paper’s editorial collective. "Most of all, their enthusiasm has been a big booster. We are a young newspaper, growing and developing all the time and the students’ great spirit and work will help us grow even more.."

El Eco, a free bi-monthly publication, is based in Asheville. The paper operates as a collective, making both editorial and operational decisions as a group. The collective is made up of members from Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador and the United States.

Media Contacts:

• Dr. Alice Weldon, UNCA Assistant Professor of Spanish, 828/251-6285
• Jill Yarnall, UNCA Public Information Assistant Director, 828/251-6526