#ualbertacsl

Can you trace your involvement with CSL? I completed my placement with the City of Edmonton (CSL 100) in Fall 2021. Currently, I am placed with Ribbon Rouge Foundation (WGS 102) and Edmonton's Chef Association (WRS 210).

Why did you decide to take your first CSL course?

When I took my junior English course (ENGL 102) with Dr. Leilei Chen in my first semester, I remember discussing CSL in our class. But, because there was already plenty of information circulating through my mind, it got lost somewhere. It wasn’t until my registration for second-year courses that I saw the word “CSL”, and that’s when I began my research - going through the CSL website, emailing the CSL team, and asking people on Discord. After about one to two weeks of research, I realized CSL was a perfect fit for me. I always had a passion for volunteering and getting to know that CSL allows students to apply their classroom knowledge to working with local communities; it provides a perfect chance for international students to get involved with local organizations and learn more about the city; I couldn’t ask for more! Finally, I enrolled in CSL 100 with Jay Friesen in my third semester. When I look back at it, I feel so happy that I made this decision.

Are you completing the CSL Certificate? Why?

Yes, I am working towards my CSL Certificate. Having a certificate in community service-learning would help me gain credibility and external validation that I have the skills needed to succeed in my professional career. In addition, it will also give me personal satisfaction of getting certified in something I enjoy doing.

What CSL placements have you completed? I have completed one placement and am currently doing two placements this semester. I worked on the Measuring Up project by the City of Edmonton and updated the City’s Measuring Up toolkit, which provides a self-assessment guide and resources to help various organizations become more accessible and inclusive.  

What was your favourite CSL placement, and why? I had the best time working on the Measuring Up project by the City of Edmonton (CoE).  As an international student, I wanted to know more about Edmonton and how the government makes the city more inclusive for everyone. I am thankful that the CoE recognizes the barriers faced by people with disabilities and continues to work for better accessibility in the city. From builders and constructors incorporating accessible housing to various companies hiring more marginalized people; things are changing. It is upon us how we can be more inclusion as individuals.

How did CSL change your ways of thinking about certain things? During my CSL placement with the City of Edmonton Accessibility Services, I did not expect to look at things from a different perspective. I thought I was just a volunteer working for an organization, trying to build my social capital. As I completed my placement with CoE, I realized I had come so far. I went from showing sympathy to people with disabilities to improving myself as an individual so that others can feel more accessible. I realized how I did not do anything for the betterment of the people around me; I realized how for granted I was taking my body and my mind for, and eventually, I realized how significant it is to help the ones in need.

What was the most important/memorable lesson you learned? I learned the most important lesson on “intersectionality” by Jay in my CSL 100 class. Intersectionality is a way to present the simple reality that disadvantage or exclusion can be based on the interaction of multiple factors rather than just one. With time, I have realized that it is a fundamental concept to know, especially when advocating for human rights. Intersectionality should be taught to more students — not just those of us who have chosen to take certain classes.

Did CSL expose you to new experiences and knowledge? How and what? CSL definitely exposed me to new experiences and knowledge. I believe it is crucial for international students to get involved in the community and know more about their surroundings. Taking a CSL course helped me be a part of the community and learn more about Edmonton.

Juanita: Converse and Cook started in the last year of my undergrad. I was doing a sustainability certificate, and my capstone project was based on the accessibility of culturally relevant and nutritious foods for international students. I came up with that topic based on working in Student Services and seeing the struggles that students were facing - everything from not being able to use the food that they were receiving from the food bank to the misconceptions around how food was grown in Canada. At the time, U of A’s campus had a ‘one size fits all’ approach to dealing with nutrition, so I was curious to see if international students’ needs were supported in this plan. The study results demonstrated that international students had unique challenges to eating well that weren’t being addressed by current campus programming.  In addition, the study highlighted that for international students, their food preferences are based on their cultural upbringing. They prefer eating in a way that replicates those dietary patterns.

On different occasions, international students I spoke to had dietary problems with the transition to the Canadian lifestyle. For example, some told me they got excited about cheese and poutine when they came to Canada only to discover they were lactose intolerant. Some students changed their diets enough here in Canada that they found they had lost their spice tolerance when they visited their home countries,  creating feelings of alienation. Beliefs and values around Canadian foods was also a huge component of food preference. For example, one student from Nigeria who had never seen seedless watermelons and couldn’t wrap his head around how they were grown in Canada. His friend, another international student, told him everything is grown in labs and genetically altered, so the student believed he would get cancer from eating fruits and vegetables here. Students also didn't have an opportunity to express or learn how to cook different cultural cuisines. They were tired of healthy eating being linked to salads and smoothies and wanted to add more cultural emphasis on food. One critical finding was that when students had social support of any kind a lot of these barriers went away.

I brought this up with the Sustainability Council (then Office of Sustainability) and we piloted cooking classes (now called Cooking Socials) with Community Service-Learning students in AREC 173. The students we worked with were a mix of domestic and international students and were able to create classes based on their lived experience and course knowledge to address research findings. In evaluating these classes we found participants repeatedly saying that the best part of the experience was the social interaction. It's not just about the free food, but the participants were coming back because this program had been set up to allow people to make personal connections and not feel like another number on campus. Our CSL students were integral in setting up this social model. They were intentional in creating a space where people felt brave to explore with food and they even helped come up with our name, Converse and Cook.

Converse and Cook is an organization that speaks to the importance of food in relationship building. Unlike traditional classes that primarily focus on food literacy and food knowledge, our cooking socials are about creating a social space where people can explore their identity and connect to the community through food. Mishma and I are by no means any food experts. We just love to cook and eat, and explore with food. But it turns out that method worked because people didn't feel like there was a power hierarchy. They felt like they could just be themselves and make mistakes. We created a space where everyone learns together and from each other. 

How is your relationship as business partners? 

Mishma: Our friendship has really been rooted in connecting with people and mental health, and we continue to water our professional relationship with care and compassion. We first met during our undergrad through a student group, but we bonded over our passion for community and specifically, the nonprofit sector. When Juanita would share her research and conversations with international students with me, we’d have hour-long conversations and brainstorming sessions about how we could mitigate these barriers for our campus community. In particular, what resonated most deeply with me was the social isolation. For me, eating has always been an experience that you share with other people. Being someone who had grown up in Edmonton my entire life, I felt a newfound anxiety around eating alone, especially when I first entered University. Suddenly, there was no fixed schedule to get together with friends or family over a lunch break. 

Juanita and I wondered about the ways we could create intentional social spaces where people could learn to cook together, and importantly, eat together. We wanted to design spaces that allowed people to connect over food, because food is a universal icebreaker. It’s something that we all have in common. 

We're a tiny nonprofit organization that is 100% volunteer run. We don’t have a dedicated kitchen space, and we certainly don't have all the tools and resources at our disposal. This is almost like a blessing in disguise, because this means that we’re often having to get creative, and often listening to our community for their tips and tricks. For example, sometimes we don't have a rolling pin and so we get creative and use a can wrapped in aluminum foil. We've had sessions where there's been no kitchen. All we've had was a classroom, and we worked with our partners to curate a menu where you wouldn’t need a stove or a microwave. The beauty of this is that it empowers our participants to cook regardless of whether they have fancy kitchen tools or not.

Our cooking socials are put together by a  community facilitator who has volunteered their time to put together a menu, and they share the story behind each dish. Sometimes those stories are passed down from several generations or even a recipe they made on budget while in their undergrad, but regardless, there's always a way of connecting. We call them cooking socials because the word class can imply some sort of hierarchy. Just calling it a ‘social’ means that you know people are here to socialize. It's informal, you come, and you enjoy, and then hopefully, you leave feeling like you're a little bit more integrated or connected to the community around you.

I think the biggest thing is that there is so much that we take for granted when we're thinking about what everyone's basic knowledge might be. For instances ovens, which are common in Canada, are not common in many parts of the world. So the nice thing about these socials is that we have people from all skill levels. I preface every class by saying that I have never really cooked a whole lot. Being one of the founders, I can openly admit that I've only recently started dabbling in cooking independently through quarantine and I think that helps a lot of people understand that you don't need to be super skilled to attend Converse and Cook programs. That’s the point is sharing an experience of cooking with others. 

Why did you decide to incorporate a cookbook into your organization?

Juanita: We heard lots of food stories in our cooking socials that we wanted to capture. We also had a growing waitlist of participants who wanted to attend, and so we often shared the recipes with folks who didn’t get a spot to empower them to cook at home. We started to dabble with the idea for a community cookbook that reflected the style of “Humans of New York” with recipes and stories. We thought it might be cool to pilot it at the UofA, where we had been doing a lot of work at the time, and since we knew that demographic well. We got 75+ submissions, and then we ended up publishing close to 49 stories and/or recipes from faculty, staff, students and alumni. Our first cookbook, “Our Stories Our Food: UAlberta’s Campus and Community Cookbook” was published in November 2019.

I think what was special about this cookbook was that it was one of the first kinds of projects where you had all these different demographics in the same place in time. I heard from students that it was inspiring to read a piece about their professor because it humanized the professor for them. The cookbook is full of themes around friendship, loss and community. This helped the reader felt more connected to the campus community. With academia, we often lead with what degree or credentials we have. In terms of community, this means we don't often get to know the person behind the role that they play. The cookbook was a  break that down. On another fun note, we had recipes from all over the world ranging from curries, borsch, gumbo, and more. 

The cookbook was also a big fundraiser for us as 100% of the proceeds went back to running present and future cooking socials. We did a book launch with a gallery to celebrate the food and stories captured in the cookbook. It was a space where people could buy the book and then also try selective recipes from the book, which was exciting. If you’re interested in the cookbook there are purchases for sale at the Bookstore or you can get it for free from the UofA library. 

Mishma: We’re currently working on our second cookbook, which is open to anyone in the City of Edmonton. We’re creating a comfort food cookbook to highlight how Edmontonians and local business are staying connected and resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can learn more about this cookbook on our website: www.conversecook.com/cookbook

Before COVID, how many classes did you have per month? How has COVID affected your operations? 

Mishma: It depended on the partnerships we had. There was a time where it was twice a month for several months, and then things slowed down because we had transitioned from being exclusively on campus to building more community partnerships. While that was happening, Covid shut everything down, so then we had to quickly figure out how we were going to adapt programming into the online space. We needed time to figure out what online events were going to look like while people were processing a pandemic. We have been working with our CSL students to figure out what people want to see from us in an online presence. We’ve worked with two groups of marketing students, writing studies students, and CSL 200 students. They’ve all brought so much wisdom and insights to our spaces. In fact it was our marketing students suggestions that helped us re-brand our website and allow us to sell our cookbooks onlien, which has been a huge help to our organization. We’re excited for the winter 2022 term, where we’ll be working with a group of Dental Hygiene students in implementing some of our programs and workshops online.

Juanita: The transition from 100% in-person to 100% online was rough. What keeps us motivated again is just connecting with other community members and the level of support and empowerment within our volunteer team. Between them and the CSL students we have worked with, so many great ideas have emerged. We’re currently working with marketing students to support getting stories from underrepresented groups like youth and seniors for our Edmonton cookbook. The students came up with a plan and have been successful. Working with these students, learning from their methodology and seeing the end project has definitely made it easier for Converse and Cook to operate during COVID-19. 

Why did you incorporate CSL students into your organization?

Mishma: CSL students bring so many valuable ideas and insights to us. We wouldn’t be who we are today without them. It's important for us to keep that going. If we’re talking about community, it's so important to engage students with the nonprofit world, especially early on in academia. What's unique with Converse and Cook is that we started from a CSL project. It shows that even as a student, you can create something with lasting impacts. CSL has been so integral in building our organization, so we want to stay true to our roots. Being able to integrate that into our practices has been so fun and exciting. 

Please trace your involvement with CSL 

My name is Chris Reyns-Chikuma, I am an associate professor in MLCS at the U of A. I have been here for ten years. I started with CSL when I started at the  U of A. I did something like CSL before at my previous job, it was not called CSL but they had similar options of working with community organizations. So I have been involved with service-learning work for a long time!

I teach both in French and English. French courses are usually 300 and 400 level classes. In French we usually work in French culture, in the broad sense, it could be French literature, French media, a lot of politics! In English it varies a lot and can be anything from 100 to 400. The topics are not much different from the French classes, but some are. For example, right now I am teaching a course on superheroes! It is about connecting the myth and the history of superheroes. It is very much the evolution of superheroes from having mostly white males, to now when there is more diversity. Right now we are talking about Black Panther, and other animations.

In this MLCS 199 Superheros, I have three options; one is a traditional essay, second is a creative option with a reflection, and the third one is CSL and a reflection. In this class what I ask them is: “What does a superhero do, and how do they help communities?” Of course it is very controversial in the theme of superheroes, like Batman for example he helps his community but he is doing it in a way that is problematic for the law in a complex way. Through CSL what I try to ask is, “Is there another way to help the community? Rather than punishing the bad guys, what about preventing the bad guys from what they are doing! If Batman has a lot of money, why not invest the money in prevention, rather than punishing people.” So, it all fits very well with CSL, because what I do is send my students to places like Hope Mission and say, “Okay, this is one way  to prevent problems, or at least try to!” 

What do you think the students get the most out of?

What I am asking my students is to reflect on the theme of the class, “What does it mean to be a superhero?” What we see is that during the class is that there is no one definition of superhero. You can have different criteria to define the superhero - the most common one is the mask, the costume, and these are the most simple ones. Of course, there are exceptions, some of them don’t have costumes, some of them don’t have masks. So we go through about fifteen criteria that define a superhero. Everytime we have five or six that are used to define one superhero that did not fit another superhero, when you go through them. Some of them are changing for example for twenty years, being a white male was a criterion of being a superhero - because before they were exclusively white males. White male was implicit, nobody would say that it was part of the definition, but it was part of the defintion, implicitly. Those definitions of superheroes are changing. 

As for the students, I am asking them to define what they are doing. For example, if they go to Hope Mission - how does Hope Mission fit the criteria, and say, “Okay, they are helping the community, check. Do they have costumes?” It could be uniforms! For example the police have  uniforms, nurses have uniforms, so we talk about this uniform issue and its complexity.

Have you changed the way you have taught with CSL?

I  have not changed anything about the way I teach recently, but when I came to the U of A, I changed a little bit. Overall it works pretty well, but I would like to have more students choose the CSL route. Most of my students who do CSL have already done CSL, and have information about it. Or students have done similar things in high school, so they know what it means a little bit. The students who do not know about CSL are the ones I would like to reach.

I plan on changing the way I teach by maybe eliminating the creative option I give students, because I think CSL is also a creative process which I would like more students to be introduced to. I am making this change because I do not have that many students who pick CSL, and many students think the creative option is the easiest so they take it. I want more students to do the CSL component because those students learn such interesting things. 

How do you think the CSL affects the student experience?

I think the CSL students love it! Most of them know that they like it and they do it because they know about CSL already. Like I said, it would be nice if more of my students tried it for the first time in this class. 

The CSL students have to write an essay, instead of the 12 pages for the non-CSL, it is 6 pages for CSL students. In that essay they have to reflect on their experience, so “Was it good, was it bad, how was it good, how was it bad?” Also how it fits the definition, in this case of this class ‘the definition of superhero’. It is a reflection on the question of “What is helping society?” and “How can you help society?” Most of the time it is in modest ways, maybe it's not special effects like a blockbuster movie, but maybe it is more effective! 

What is your experiences with CSL?

Personally, I love CSL. I am in favour of it. Even if I do not do it every semester, or every class - because it is more work, not much more work but still, more work. Also, it does not work in every class, because the topics can be different. I really believe in CSL, I really think it is a great tool for the University to be relevant, and to be out of the ivory tower, and for students to realize that they can do something very useful. 

In my case, for example, I have only talked about superheroes, but in my French classes where I teach about French culture the students go to French school's and things like that and then they practice their French, or teach French. This is where students learn more concretely, something that they might know abstractly, that French is useful outside the classroom. The students see it as very useful. 

I found out about CSL through one of my co-workers who had previously taken a CSL class. Going into the program, I thought it would be fulfilling to volunteer with a partnered organization while taking an interesting class, but coming out of it I received more than I had anticipated! 

In my CSL placement, I worked with the ACCESS Outreach Team at the University of Alberta, located in CAB. ACCESS Outreach focuses on tutoring (math/writing) and counselling. Counselling is provided through the numerous community brokers that the organization partners with and the tutoring is provided by volunteer students. The project my partner and I completed specifically involved conducting an Environmental Scan of the entire City of Edmonton and compiling a database of resources for students and faculty. This task included branching out across the city and interviewing the representatives of several different organizations to figure out if their services would be a good fit for the community here at the University of Alberta. The types of services we searched for in particular included counselling clinics, money management, food services and shelters among many others.

Over the course of the term, I discovered that service-learning plays a vital role in personal development, this is because it links the fortunate with the less fortunate and the privileged with the non-privileged. These connections help students realize the advantages they enjoy in society and the experiences help students practice gratitude which can go a long way in improving their quality of life. In addition to these benefits, service-learning may also influence career paths for students as there are several different community partners and situations available for students to get involved with.

Regarding my placement, it was certainly eye-opening to discover the vast number of counselling services that are available in Edmonton, especially walk-in clinics that don’t require appointments and clinics that operate on a non-profit basis offering their services free of charge. There are several places in the city where you can walk in, sit down and receive counselling. I had no idea these clinics existed and it is fulfilling to know that the work my partner and I completed over this term will help several students and faculty (that are also unaware of these supports) get the mental health support (and other supports) they need!