ABSTRACT
West Point’s Department of Foreign Languages provides students with collaborative experiential learning opportunities based within the surrounding community in order to bring multifaceted language, cultural, and civic engagement beyond the classroom for many of their students in a variety of language courses. This chapter highlights examples of the various ways these students in beginner Russian, intermediate Spanish and advanced French engage with the local and regional community in educational and noneducational settings. The style of community engagement incorporates many of the key elements of service-learning, including experiential learning, robust and continuous relationships with community partners, and deliberate inclusion in the academic structure of the course, primarily through reflection. It also provides an effective solution for instructors facing similar logistical constraints while demonstrating the value of incorporating not only a form of experiential learning but one that approximates the service-learning model.
