Established in 2024 in honor of Eric and Mimi Carlson, this award recognizes a student for being a highly effective contributor to a community engagement or civic engagement collaboration during their time at Carleton. Awardees must be thoughtful, dedicated, valued contributors to a shared effort that addresses a social issue, and David Toledo is just that.
We interviewed him with his Northfield Public Library Supervisor Angelica Linder about his experiences with community collaboration in his community based work study job as a Spanish Programming Library Assistant. He has been in that role for three years, teaching a computer class in Spanish for Spanish-speaking adults who are trying to learn basic computer skills. Here are a few highlights about collaboration from our conversation.
Listen to community members.
Sinda: It sounds like there was a good alignment from the beginning between what felt important to you, David, and what felt important to the participants, but where did you have to adapt a bit to do what was going to be most useful?
Angelica: He was able to adapt well to the class and its needs. Some participants wanted to improve their typing skills, so he found a simple app where they could practice typing, track their progress, and see how fast they were getting.
David: Listening to what the students want to learn about is always going to make your classes more fun, because they’ll start feeling comfortable and asking questions about stuff. At the end of every class, I give them a little quiz to see what they learned from the class. And then at the end it’s like, “Do you have any questions?” And then I take those questions and I start the next class with answering those questions. I feel like they really appreciate that because like, “Okay, if I have a question, you’ll answer it,” and then they just ask more questions or they follow up during the lecture, “What about this or what about that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, like of course, we can spend the whole time talking about that, if that’s what we want.” And then that kind of helps create more of that bond and if you have that bond, the students will keep coming back. And then you just have to create your little community and you’re happy to go to work. You’re not like, “Oh, I got to teach these classes.” It’s like, “Oh, I get to see my students,” you know?
Trust looks like being comfortable asking for help.
Sinda: That’s probably part of how you created trust with them by asking them what they cared about and then actually doing something with that.
David: It feels really nice whenever one of my students reaches out to me and asks for some sort of help, because it just solidifies for me the connection that I’ve been able to build with them for those three years. One of my students always wanted to rent out this Roku streaming device from the library. And he did it once by himself, but then he emailed me, outside of class saying, “Hey, this isn’t working. Can you help me figure out how to connect it?” And so I went to the library, on a day that I wasn’t going to work, just to meet up with him. And we set it up. I showed him how to do it, and he took it back. And then he emailed. He’s like, “Yeah, it’s working out. Thank you so much.” I have moments like that. I’m really glad they feel comfortable enough to ask for help.
Learning goes both ways.
Sinda: One of the other parts of collaboration is that learning goes both ways. You’ve shared a few things that the class participants were able to learn from you, David. But I wonder if there’s something that you learned through doing this over the last three years.
David: One student gave me a CD of their wedding, and they wanted me to help them digitize it so that they could keep a copy of it. And …it was not as straightforward as I thought it was going to be. I spent a whole two weeks trying to figure it out. I was able to learn officially how to move the files from one place to another. And then I was able to show her how to upload those files onto her Google Drive. Now she has a copy of her wedding on Google Drive. It felt really nice to learn how to connect with one of my students.
Angelica: The student, a working adult, would have otherwise had to pay someone for that support. Through this class, they can improve their skills at no cost.
Sinda: What did you learn about yourself in this whole thing, David?
David: Something that I’ve always been told in my life is that I have a lot of patience. My students, they always say at the end of the class, “Thank you for having so much patience with me.” But it was just fun. I didn’t think I was exerting any patience. So maybe that I like working with people. I know some people are always like, “I don’t want to deal with them,” or “I don’t want to have these interactions,” but to me, doing this job, I was like, “This is something that I can see myself doing moving forward, finding a place to teach or finding some sort of computer-related teaching job.” I found it fun. I think it’s rewarding.
It’s mutual: We both get something out of this.
Sinda: What was it about the library that made you really commit like this, for three years?
David: I think one of the strongest parts of it was having a Hispanic community around me, because from the [job] interview, I felt a really strong connection with Angelica. I was like, “Wow, I’ve been at Carleton for a year and I haven’t felt this — because I started my sophomore year at the library. I was like, “Whoa, this is like a really nice, separate part [of the community] apart from Carleton. This is a nice community.” And then when I started working the actual job, apart from the other Hispanic people that work at the library, my little community of students, that just felt really nice. It kind of reminded me of my parents: I’m helping them; I don’t want to let them down. I want to keep making sure that I’m doing my job well. And so it just kind of built on that. And then eventually I’m like, “I can’t leave them now. I want to stay. I want to stick around and see it through to the end. . .It’s been one of the most important parts of my Carleton time.”
This collaboration makes a difference.
Sinda: What does this class mean for the library?
Angelica: “To tell the truth, and I’ll be honest, if we don’t have the students as student workers, we would not be able to do this program. We don’t have the capacity.”
David: I’m pretty sure this job changed my perspective of a library because when I went to my library when I was small, in Chicago, I never thought of a library as hosting events , or like a community. I’ve always thought it was just grabbing a book or a place to study.
Sinda: Are there ways that you are seeing your education in computer science differently because of the work that you’ve done at the library?
David: Right now I’m taking a class called social computing, which is about how people and computers interact with each other. And I think I learned a good chunk of what I’m learning right now by watching how my students interact with stuff like email or posting stuff. At some point I tried using Google Classroom to group them all together in one place, and that was a learning curve. It was much work for them. So I just discontinued it.
There is this other class called “Human Computer Interaction” [an ACE course]. Whenever I see them interacting with the computer, I’m like, “Oh, okay, they probably don’t notice that this does that.” Sometimes there’s the little ‘this website uses cookies’ button — you have to click that before you can do anything else on a computer. And so seeing how they sometimes miss that completely, I’m like, “Oh no. You have to click here first.” And that reminds me of the concepts of human computer interaction. If it was in the center of the screen, they would have seen it first, but it’s in the corner. Then they get confused.
For more information about community based work study jobs at Carleton, contact Danielle Trajano at dtrajano@carleton.edu.
