University-Community Links

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.

University-Community Links

This chapter describes the history of UC Links, including the original Fifth Dimension and its later adaptation, La Clase Mágica, and how through these programs' learning activities, undergraduates enrolled in a university practicum course, and younger peers, participating in a local after-school program, together engage in the joint exploration of digital technologies. The authors then describe how the original model began to be adopted and adapted in a network of colleges and universities throughout the United States and beyond. The chapter offers concise descriptions of UC Links founding university-community partnerships and a summary of its institutional strategies for ensuring program accountability and sustainability. The chapter closes with an ethnographic focus on the historical development of the Fifth Dimension in Solana Beach, from the time it became a UC Links program in 1996 to the present.

The Ivory Tower in a World of Trouble

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.

Pandemonium

This chapter explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and how California UC Links programs adapted and transformed undergraduate and K-12 program activities in response to the deepening COVID-19 crisis. The authors review challenges faced by programs and how they leveraged and strengthened existing partnerships to engage K-12 participants. Emerging responses to the ever-changing context of the pandemic are also explored, and the authors focus on re-envisioning the UC Links undergraduate course and school- and community-based activities. Innovative activities that UC Links programs and their partners designed and piloted in the Spring and Summer quarters of 2020 are explored, including distributing resources, creating mediated hands-on activities, producing mediated virtual activities, and bridging after- and in-school activities. Learnings from virtual summer programs and Fall 2020 collaborative activities are summarized as context for both understanding and co-constructing future activities developed in response to shelter-in-place conditions.

University-Community Links as a Sociotechnical Activity System

In this chapter, the authors continue to approach UC Links as a sociotechnical activity system, viewing the collaborative work of community and university partners as activity that takes place in localized primary work settings and in a geographically and institutionally dispersed community of learners. Following Rogoff, this chapter adjusts analytical lenses from a focus on the local program site to view this cognitive process at both the whole organizational and macrosocial planes of observation. In the example of the UC Links network, whole organizational systems consist of broader collectivities of people who work across interconnected primary work systems, as people in those various primary settings learn from each other and coordinate their own localized efforts with others beyond their immediate range of activity. On the macrosocial plane, external constraints and opportunities impacting the primary and whole organizational systems come into focus as formative conditions defining the dynamic context in which primary activities emerge.

Learners' Voices

In this chapter, the authors examine examples of local, national, and global adaptations of UC Links programs to explore university and community engagement over time and across a range of contexts. The authors describe the development of a number of programs, including two Brazilian programs, two programs working with gitano (Roma) communities in Spain, and perhaps the most enduring Fifth Dimension program – the Whittier College Fifth Dimension. They examine the collaborative development of these programs in relation to the ways that they co-constructed activities to support the navigational play of children and university students in creating and participating in collaborative learning activities. The authors also describe the “border activities” – the sustained collaborative work of adults from different backgrounds and communities – crucial to developing these programs as themselves forms of navigational play that serve to integrate participants' metacognitive understandings of their collaborative work.

Transitions and Transformations

University-community engagement involves the co-construction of “knots of collaboration” that must be reconstructed again and again in ever-changing contexts in which participants necessarily expand their perspectives on the task at hand. This chapter provides a greater understanding of this process of integrative learning and its relation to expansive learning by viewing the historical development of UC Links programs such as La Clase Mágica through the trifocal lens of the sociotechnical activity system. The example of LCM demonstrates how, as university and community participants engage, they find overlaps in their diverse perspectives and begin to integrate them. In this expansive learning process, the university and community participants come to approach each other as equal partners in mutual relations of exchange that provide for the bidirectional flow of cultural knowledge between disparate and often irreconcilable cultural systems, and for the integration of multiple funds of knowledge.

Displacement and Dialogue

In this chapter, the authors draw on UC Links research to define university-community engagement as a form of expansive learning. Through comparative analysis of various program sites, the authors examine how UC Links community and university partners have worked together to build programmatic strategies for re-engaging disengaged students through innovative learning activities that have been developed in collaboration and through a process of critical dialoguing between community and university people. The authors begin with an ethnographic look at Oakland Y-PLAN (Youth – Plan, Learn, Act, Now) to show how these activities exemplify young people's expansive learning and how adults and young people from the university, the community, and multiple local organizations and agencies have learned how to work together productively – in other words, how they have learned to listen to each other's voices to transform the oppressive structures of the past and present and, in this way, envision and build a more equitable future.

Violence and Voice

Historically marginalized populations in the US, although culturally different, have come under similarly intensified macrosocial pressures that have increasingly challenged their resilience and well-being. These populations have been both geographically set apart through discriminatory practices and educationally disadvantaged through exclusionary institutional practice and the imbalanced allocation of public resources. They have inevitably developed as displaced communities – whose access to resources and participation in local decision-making have been systematically limited or blocked. Many of the communities with which UC Links works have found themselves facing this pervasive displacement in ways that bring their university partners into action with them. In this context, the difficulties of coordinating program activity at times challenge their capacity to sustain their work, and at other times have the effect of deepening their collaborations as they co-construct a zone for listening to each other's voices and expanding understandings of each other's perspectives.