Alicia Soueid, MA

Senior French Lecturer and lower level coordinator
of French, Department of Modern Languages,
College of Liberal Arts

Service Learning Course(s):

• Intermediate French II (FREN 2314)

“Service Learning can actually be a step toward an internship or a similar kind of practice. It helps students develop skills, conduct outreach, and use tools that they’ve been developing."

Professor Alicia Soueid has been teaching at UTA since 2002 and was drawn to service learning because she felt it was a great opportunity for young people to connect to their local and global environments. By incorporating service learning, students can get to know the public and set habits in college that will help them with outreach, which Professor Soueid believes they are likely to continue after college. She believes UTA can benefit from more designated service learning classes because it opens up students to future job prospects, which can lead to student volunteering or even internships, which is something that a lot of employers look at. For her service learning project, she partnered with the UTA Health Center as well as the international nonprofit organization, Doctors Without Borders. Her students worked with these organizations by doing research on mosquito borne diseases around the world, then translating their research to put on displays. These displays were then placed all over campus to help make students and faculty more aware of the dangers of mosquito borne diseases. This has been Professor Soueid’s only service learning project so far, but she hopes to partner with other nonprofits soon and create more service learning opportunities for her students.

Professor Souied advises faculty interested in service learning to not be discouraged. Even if you do not come up with the perfect plan initially, that’s ok because it is a learning experience for students and professors alike. No matter what happens, students will learn something so do not worry if it doesn’t not look perfect the first time around. Try it out and if you need to make adjustments or change the project entirely; at least you already have the experience and can move forward with what you have learned.