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REVISTA KRONOS 3(2), agosto-enero 2023 | pISSN 12631-2840 | eISSN 2631-2859
A reection on community-service activities: Inuence of teachinglearning through community-service activities in undergraduate students
At rst, I thought ‘I will be a teacher. I’ll stand in front of my students, and I will talk to them,’ but
now that I was already in front of a group, it is not just that. It is much more than that. It is preparing
material, catching their attention, and keeping everything on point because you need to care about
your students. It is not just lecturing them but being humans, understanding how it is that they learn
and what activities make them feel more comfortable. This process helped me improve my activities
as a future teacher and be more condent about myself. (Participant a, personal communication, May
18th, 2022)
Participant b contributed to this idea as well:
I think the main thing I improved was my patience. I used to be very impatient, but now I have worked
on that because I understand what I know they did not know, so I needed to be patient. Also, I learned
to be a teacher; I learned how to teach those kids and not just tell them when something is wrong
but explain to them and talk about their mistakes. I try to help them. I even had a notebook just for
this activity where I took notes of the words I needed to research because I did not know them, but I
wanted to give my students a quality class. (Participant
b
, personal communication, May 19th, 2022)
It is worth emphasizing that “the increasing prevalence of standards, high-stakes testing,
and outcomes assessment obscure the value of reection, and much else, from elds of vi-
sion” (Ward & McCotter, 2004); nonetheless, in this study, the researcher considered re-
ection as one of the critical results due to the nature of the research paper. Then, as the
third piece of information of this code, students revealed their reection on the practices
that they recognized to be faulty by proposing ideas to improve those areas:
I recognize that I need to improve things. I am studying my fourth semester yet, and there is a long
way to the top. Mainly, I would say that I need to improve my time management. In some classes, I
ended up not doing one or two activities that were planned because I did not manage the previous
activities correctly, and I was just focused on seeing my students having fun. In general, I think I have
to organize my classes better, especially in timing matters. (Participant A, personal communication,
May 18th, 2022)
I used to think that the topics for my students who were 10 to 11 years old could be the alphabet or
colors, but then my guide teacher suggested using routines and more complicated things, and at rst,
I thought it would be dicult, but then I learned they could do that and more. After the practice, I
recognized I used to be very bitter. Then, if there is another chance to enter this program, I would be
more dynamic and play more games because, in virtual education, it was sort of dicult to do that. In
a face-to-face program, I would be able to see them, and I would do my best. (Participant b, personal
communication, May 19th, 2022)
Students, according to their narratives, evinced that the changes in their views and reec-
tions did not appear from the very rst moment they were involved in the practice. Based
on their reections and stories, we can show it was part of a process where they gradually
acquired dierent skills, abilities, and awareness. After analyzing these testimonies, the key
codes that were constantly repeated included the words ‘dicult’, ‘improve’, and ‘learn’. As
an interesting fact, we can take these three codes to delimit the time frame that they went
through during their practices to notice the changes in their viewpoints.
According to the testimonies, it is evidenced that students at rst were afraid or un-
willing to be part of the proposed project and it was dicult for them to start the process
or follow the expected instructions for eective classes. Later, the ongoing practices pushed
them to learn how to teach, how to manage a class, and how to put into practice what
they already knew with the guidance of their teachers. Finally, based on what they already
knew, they identied opportunities to improve their performance based on the students’
interaction and the eectiveness of their classes according to their own reections on them.
Thus, based on this reection, we can remark on the transformative potential essence of
the service-learning experiences.