National, Regional, and Global Networks for University Community Engagement

This chapter offers a cultural historical perspective on a multi-site dispersed community of collaboratively engaged university and community partners called University-Community Links (UC Links). The chapter begins by defining the concept of university-community engagement and moves to an ethnographic description of university-community engagement as a sociotechnical activity system. Viewing UC Links in this conceptual framework enables us to examine the educational activity between K-12 and university students and how localized activity is implemented and developed through collaborative activity among adults working together across the multiple boundaries of local institutions. The chapter explores how those localized efforts are both extended and limited, influenced, and enhanced by collaborative activity at much broader organizational and macrosocial planes of activity. This multi-layered analysis begins with the early experience of a young participant at La Clase Mágica, one of the two original Solana Beach, California sites out of which the broader UC Links initiative emerged.

Download Full-text

The Ivory Tower in a World of Trouble

A Cultural Historical Approach to Social Displacement and University-Community Engagement - Advances in Educational Marketing, Administration, and Leadership ◽

10.4018/978-1-7998-7400-3.ch001 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-30

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Collaborative Learning ◽

Community Engagement ◽

Ivory Tower ◽

Joint Activity ◽

Community Partners ◽

Expansive Learning ◽

Ethnographic Approach ◽

Shared Activity ◽

University Community

This chapter introduces the authors' approach to university-community engagement as the process of collaborative learning among the young people engaged in afterschool activities run by University-Community Links (UC Links), along with the community and university people who have collectively engaged in designing, planning, and implementing those program activities. The prevalence of social displacement among community participants suggests a primary point for understanding the role that universities can play by engaging in the larger world. The chapter introduces the authors' ethnographic approach to the study of expansive learning among collaborating community and university partners as they confront dilemmas implicit in their engagement in joint activity and come to view their shared activity from an expanded perspective that transforms how they work together. The chapter then describes the historical emergence of UC Links, a California initiative that connects university and community partners in addressing pervasive social displacement and educational inequities.

Download Full-text