More Than Words: How Community Changes Language Learning at Duke
Duke’s Community-Based Language Initiative (CBLI) brings language to life through relationships, real-world experiences and learning with communities.
Spanish 310 students and professors Melissa Simmermeyer and Joan Munné, on a visit to the Durham County Courthouse, to see how interpretation works in the courts. Guide for the visit: E. Deneen Barrier. Photo credit E. Deneen Barrier.
FRENCH 308S workshop at Loaf, a bakery in downtown Durham
On a Sunday morning at Loaf, a small bakery in downtown Durham, students from the service-learning course Manger: Food and Food Systems in the French-Speaking World (French 308S) have flour on their hands. They are there to make bread alongside the bakery’s owner — and to hear him talk, in French, about where his flour comes from, who buys his bread, and the farmers, markets, restaurants and customers that make up the local food community.
For Laura Florand, who teaches the course, that kind of exchange is part of the point. After the pandemic, she began rethinking what a French class could do beyond teaching vocabulary. “I was really interested in trying to recreate community and connection,” Florand said. “How can I get students back into the world — and myself, too?”
Joan Clifford, director of Duke Service-Learning and the Community-Based Language Initiative (CBLI), recognizes the impulse. Long before CBLI existed, when she was a young Spanish professor in Illinois, she began taking students into a local grade school. “I wanted to break through the classroom wall,” she said.
Duke language faculty have been finding their own ways through that wall for more than two decades. The initiative’s roots began in Romance Studies in 2004 with Spanish service-learning and later moved to Duke Service-Learning around 2010. Today, CBLI connects faculty and courses across Duke’s language programs through community-engaged teaching and learning.
Now, a collaborative project called Making Community-Engaged Learning Visible is giving 10 language faculty a more intentional way
Duke students in Chinese 102 put their language skills to work during a scavenger hunt at a local Asian market, practicing Chinese through shopping, conversations and cultural exploration. The activity was organized by Professors Tianshu He and Jiali Guo.
to learn from one another — sharing approaches and resources and comparing what they have learned through years of working with communities.
Language is relational
While the formats of community-engaged language learning can vary widely, the underlying question is similar: What happens when language becomes not simply something students study, but something they use in relationships with other people?
“Language is more than words in a textbook. You can use a translation app to find the right words, but that doesn’t mean you’ve built a relationship,” Clifford said.
Yan Liu, associate professor of the practice in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, has watched those relationships deepen through more than a decade of collaboration with Durham Academy Mandarin teacher Bonnie Wang. In the service-learning course Chinese 451: China and the U.S. in the Age of Climate Change, Duke students and younger Chinese-language learners have worked together through class visits, teaching activities and shared projects.
“Our students interact with Duke students and imagine, ‘That’s me in two years.’ And Duke students, in turn, see themselves nurturing the next generation,” Wang said. “It’s a mutual inspiration.”
Community members also bring knowledge and experience of their own. “Within the critical service-learning framework, there is the understanding that community members are experts,” Clifford said. That shift — from approaching community relationships primarily as opportunities for language practice to recognizing how much students and faculty can learn from them — connects otherwise very different courses.
Learning to adjust
Recognizing community members as teachers also means recognizing how community knowledge can shape learning. Clifford remembers a former student whose class partnered with Qué Pasa, a Spanish-language newspaper. After receiving extensive feedback from a journalist on an article she had written, the student eventually realized she had been working from her own perspective rather than the reader’s.
“The breakthrough moment was when she realized, ‘I’m the one who has to adjust,’” Clifford said. “There was a humility in that. Instead of assuming that what she had produced was what the community needed, she had to listen, learn from the feedback and change her approach."
Students in Spanish 310 in an activity during a class visit by Yasmin Wurts Polizzi, interpreter and interpreter trainer. Students laugh in surprise at how difficult consecutive interpretation is.
Faculty adjust, too. In a Spanish translation course, Joan Munné and Melissa Simmermeyer, both senior lecturers in Romance Studies, have given students opportunities to shadow professional interpreters and produce translations for community use. The work raises a practical responsibility: students are still learning, while community partners need work they can rely on.
“If there is a balance, it is not one you strike in the moment; it is one you design into the course well before a student and a community partner are in the room together,” Munné said. “Students learn that effective translation is a practice and a process, long before it is a product.”
That means building toward community-facing work through student peer revision, faculty review and exposure to professional interpreters and translators. “We decide in advance how much risk each stage of the course can responsibly carry,” Simmermeyer added, “building toward realistic and supported outcomes rather than sending student translators to partners unprepared.”
Learning from one another
Those kinds of experiences — successes, adjustments and questions still being worked through — are what faculty are now bringing into conversation with one another.
At one recent Making Community-Engaged Learning Visible gathering, Spanish faculty recognized parallels with Chinese colleagues’ K–12 partnerships; faculty compared questions about proficiency and translation; and Amal Boumaaza, who teaches Arabic, described how resources developed by Munné helped her launch a community-based project of her own.
“Without it, I would not have been able to do it,” Boumaaza said. “Everything was planned and ready to use.”
For Clifford, that kind of exchange gets at why bringing faculty together matters. “The best answers come from when someone else has fought the battle and come out with some kind of solution,” she told the group.
Germain Choffart, lecturing fellow in Romance Studies who teaches French 101, has similarly drawn inspiration from colleagues’ community-engaged courses.
French 101 students learn how Trosa processes clothing donations and practice describting outfits in French. (Photo courtesy Germain Choffart)
“Some of the best ideas for my own classroom come from seeing what colleagues are already doing,” Choffart said. “Seeing how they built service-learning and community partnerships into their teaching inspired me to redesign parts of my own French 101 course.”
The point is not to make every course look the same, but to share the questions, lessons and practical knowledge accumulated through years of implementing community-engaged language teaching.
“Faculty are genuinely curious about what their colleagues are doing,” Clifford said. “They’re willing to share what they’ve learned, what they’re still figuring out, and to learn from one another. There’s a lot of generosity in that.
