Abstract
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.
TopIntroduction
Sixth-grader José was sitting in front of a computer. His gaze passed back and forth from the screen to the keyboard and back. He was trying to write the words of a sentence about Guatemala, his country of origin. He looked around the keyboard, found the letter he was searching for, and struck it with his right index finger. He looked for the next letter of the word, found it, and struck the key with the same finger. He continued this process slowly and laboriously, at times distracted by the older students around him.
José kept at his typing, letter by letter. The only thing keeping him going was the story he was eager to tell. It was a “Where I’m From” activity in the after-school program he attended, and José appeared to like the idea of talking about his country of origin and his long journey to Oakland a few months before. But the typing was difficult for him. The other students were clicking away steadily at the computers to his left and right as they worked on digital stories about their families, countries of origin, or the new community where they were now living.
A number of University of California (UC) Berkeley undergraduates were working with the children on their digital stories. Guided by the undergraduates, the children looked for images of their home countries, which, for most of them, were primarily in Central America and Southeast Asia. Excited about the activity, the young people in the computer room began to connect the images they liked sequentially and, with the undergraduates’ help, started to write text that connected the images they’d selected to their memories and reflections about where they came from. They added various kinds of fadeout and fade-in transitions between the images, looked for music they considered suitable for the soundtrack, and reflected on their personal experiences in relation to the images.
From time to time, the children looked over each other’s shoulders at their classmates’ evolving work. The children less experienced with digital media often asked the more experienced children about their work.
“How did you do that?” they asked.
Sometimes they clustered in groups of two or three, all interested in learning how to carry out a particular kind of operation. One of them responded to one such query:
“Easy. Like this.”
And the others watched as the more experienced student showed her expertise. The students did not teach each other; they simply showed each other how to make things happen on the computer or let others watch them as they determined how to accomplish a task.
José was younger than most of the other students, who were seventh and eighth graders, and he constantly glanced at them as they were working on their projects. He observed what they were writing about, heard how they thought about their own lives and how they put them into words, and watched how they pulled in images to illustrate what they were writing. They had been in the program longer, and so they mostly knew how to approach their projects without anyone, even the undergraduates, telling them what to do. José continued to type with one finger, arduously working his way through each word and finally finishing each sentence or sentence fragment, going back and forth between Spanish and English. From time to time, he became frustrated. He stood up and walked around to observe the others. He stood silently for a while behind the small groups and watched how they worked, sometimes on their own and sometimes together.
José was just starting the sixth grade, having entered school several weeks after the beginning of the school year. He was taking part in the Expedition Program, an after-school program located at Roosevelt Middle School in East Oakland. He had been in the United States for only a few months, and Roosevelt was the first school he had attended in this country. Like other children in the program, he still found the school strange and the ways people acted very arbitrary. He was learning English – his teachers only spoke English in class – but he found it difficult because there were many words that the teacher and the other students used that were unfamiliar to him. Only in the after-school program was his first language consistently available to him as a resource. Some of the undergraduates who took part in the after-school program spoke a little Spanish, and as they talked with the children, the communication constantly went back and forth between English and Spanish.
José stared at his computer screen, puzzled for a moment.
“How do you say ‘a falta de pan, tortillas?’” (a Guatemalan idiomatic phrase) he asked a nearby undergraduate.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Activity System: A coordinated system of complementary tasks and activities with cumulative objectives.
Participatory Appropriation: The view that learning, defined as changing participation in sociocultural activities over time, may be observed in terms of participants’ movement from peripheral to more integral participation in specific activities, highlighting change both in the level of individuals’ participation and in the nature of their participation.
Relational Habitus: The historically emergent ensemble of tools, tasks, selves, and others, representing an orienting stance, implicit or explicit, that informs collective practical activity.
Observant Participation: The ethnographic approach that positions the researcher as collaboratively engaged in joint activity in the process of the co-discovery and production of knowledge, such that the researcher’s participation with others in the joint activity, rather than observation of others, is emphasized.
Degraded Environments: Historically emergent spaces, often damaged or destroyed in environmental disasters as the direct or indirect result of globalized capitalist enterprise, and reconfigured by human beings who are acting in response to overwhelming sociopolitical and/or environmental circumstances.
Knotworking: The view that collaboration must be continually reconstructed and negotiated according to the shifting needs, interests, and concerns of participants in response to the problem at hand (Engeström, 2008).
Displaced Communities: Communities of diverse people, often informally established, that have been involuntarily thrown together by historical or socio-political circumstances.