December, 2021. Twenty-one faces appeared in little boxes on Zoom, as we gathered for the first of a series of writing workshops that would lead to the book you now hold in your hands (or read on your screen). Greetings began flowing into the Zoom chat: “¡Buenos días!” “Morning!” “Good evening!” Most of us were just waking up, at 8 am in California, with coffee cups in hand, while Lisa and Luca (in Italy) and Tom (in Germany) were wrapping up their workdays. We had managed to find a time that worked for most of us, despite being spread across international time zones.

Mara (in Berkeley) and Marjorie (in Los Angeles) began the workshop with some thoughts about the experiment we were about to embark on and its purpose: to develop an edited volume in a fully collaborative style, true to our theoretical commitments and the work we do in our collaborative in -school and out-of-school programs, and in our network as a community: in a way that felt supportive, collegial, intellectually stimulating, and FUN. We agreed to video-record our sessions, to keep notes about the process, and to share our work as it developed, evolved, and changed—as we knew it would. Embracing the process of change, and trusting in that process, is central to our work.

We launched the workshop with a discussion of the purpose, style and nature of opening vignettes like the one you are reading now. These openings would introduce each of the university-community partnerships represented in this book and give consistency to the volume, much like the ones Mara had developed (along with Charles Underwood and Olga Vásquez) for another book about the network, and like the vignettes Marjorie used in a book about one of the sites that is represented in this book (Chap. 6). This new volume would build on those prior works and merge the insights we have gained from our different positions in the network across the last 30+ years. At the same time, we would expand our vision by including more voices set in different contexts, and together imagine even more possibilities for the future of education and community-university collaborations.

Workshop participants raised questions that highlighted the complexities of developing these seemingly simple still-life portraits. “How do I craft a vignette that represents our program fairly while contributing to the overarching narrative that brings this book together?” “What risks are there in ‘fossilizing’ a few moments from our work, which is so varied and wide-ranging?” “Our programs change every year, in response to changing circumstances. Might we introduce our program in a moment of time, which might not be the current time?” We discussed these and questions about narrative choices. Together we reflected on how to bring our audiences into our work through these starting-point descriptions, in our hope of helping the dynamism of our programs come alive on the page for readers. “Pintando una imagen con palabras” Karla (now in Colorado; see her first-person testimonial in Chap. 12) offered in the Zoom chat. “Painting with words” Dogukan—(in Santa Barbara)—echoed in English.

Next, Marjorie led the group in a short guided meditation, the kind of contemplative practice that both Marjorie and Mara have tried to bring into our scholarly lives in meaningful ways. This is a practice that we would continue in different ways in our workshops over the years to come. On this first day, we used the meditation to ground ourselves on the different geographical lands we were Zooming in from and where our program sites are located, in order to connect us with the histories of those lands by acknowledging the original caretakers, as well as our own histories of connection to our program sites, our universities, and each other. We acknowledged the Tongvan and Gabrielino people who lived in the land now called Los Angeles long before UCLA was established as a “land-grant” institution. We invoked the name of the Ohlone people who were the original caretakers of what is now Berkeley, California. Our colleagues in Italy and Germany thought about the history that led to the formation of Europe’s current nation-states, long before those states began the work of colonizing lands, peoples, and minds—work that we are now trying to unsettle, as we decolonize our ways of thinking about education in this volume. We tried to take in the complexity of the cultural and sociohistorical forces that have shaped the world as we now know it, that are so important for the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) that informs our intellectual work.

In the course of this meditation, we invited participants to “let our minds wander over to our program sites” in order to see what words, images, sounds and smells were evoked. “See what bubbles up for you as you think about your site, and how you can convey that to others. How would you describe your school and community partnerships? How are the undergraduates from your university courses engaged with the young people in your in-school or after-school programs? What do the informal literacy-based activities in your program look like?” These multi-sensorial memories would serve as raw material for the vignettes we would begin to sketch that day, and inspiration for the challenges of analyzing and writing about spaces where we have lived, moved, breathed, and experienced so many things: joy, frustration, wonder, delight. We then moved into breakout rooms to share and vet our ideas in cross-site conversations, before each local site team began the hard work of writing in their own breakout rooms.

When we reconvened at the end of the 90-minute session, people were hungry to share their work, read others’, and learn from each other about the writing-discovery process. Kathy, in Whittier, California, suggested we develop a Google Doc where everyone could copy and paste their draft vignettes, or their outlines, ideas, musings. This would be one of the ways in which we would use technological tools to think together, and to ease and enhance our collective work. Everyone took some time to upload their work and also to read and comment on the drafts that were shared by colleagues around the globe. Smiles radiated across the Zoom room as participants shared their reactions to this experimental approach to developing the chapters that you are about to read.

This vignette describes the first day of the on-line writing process that led to this edited volume. By bringing our collective voices, knowledge, and experiences together, we craft stories of what is possible for transformative models of education and offer strategies for co-creating learning environments that are innovative, collaborative, democratic, equity-oriented—and fun. Our goal is to draw lessons from our collective and local histories—and to make visible what we know is possible—even as we help to reimagine educational practices, policies and programs for the future.

The chapters in this volume, authored by the people who appeared in those little boxes on our computer screens, who are living and working with communities around the world, describe transformative models of learning in both formal and informal contexts. We offer them as models of innovative learning spaces, as we imagine new possibilities for educational practice in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the programs we describe are in California, where this vision of university–community partnerships was originally birthed in the 1980s as the 5th Dimension and later as La Clase Mágica, before it became what we refer to here as UC Links https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/). Others are in Germany, Italy, Spain, Uganda, and Uruguay where new university-community partnerships have taken root from seeds that took to the winds from California.

In each of these partnerships, communities of learners have been established in innovative in-school and out-of-school programs that link university faculty and students with young people and their families and communities. These programs are anchored in and responsive to specific, local histories. At the same time, they are connected in a “sociotechnical activity system” (Underwood et al., 2021; Trist, 1981) that includes individual program sites, the larger network, and broader social conditions. In Chap. 2, we describe the network’s organizing system as it has operated within a macrosocial historical context. In the remaining chapters you will find descriptions of how the UC Links model has been adapted in various programs set in diverse communities. In this introduction we describe a set of values and structures that are common across the geographically distributed group of programs; then in the chapters themselves you can see variations in forms that they take.

University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education

UC Links programs, including those represented in this volume, all involve long-term university–community partnerships that are used to co-create learning environments for college students in university courses and young people in school and community settings. Core components of the UC Links model of university–community partnership include: Engaged university and community partners, a university-based course, and a program with informal learning activities designed to engage university undergraduate and graduate students with young people (from primary through secondary school) from historically marginalized communities. University faculty teach undergraduate coursework across a range of disciplines. As part of that coursework, undergraduate and graduate students participate with K-12 students in programs that have been developed collaboratively by university faculty and local school and community partners. These programs also become sites for collaborative research.

This kind of long-term, reciprocal, and substantive relationship between university and community partners is rare, despite persistent calls to break the barriers between “town and gown,” to increase “service learning” opportunities for students, and to do research that has practical value in the world. The structures and logics of academia make it hard to sustain relationships and to bring all participants to the table in equitable ways that acknowledge and respond to our different needs and interests, as well as the different demands on us as students, researchers, teachers and community members. Across this book, we share some of the things that have contributed to the success of this model, even as we acknowledge its challenges.

The university courses that anchor these community–university partnerships engage undergraduates from different disciplines and programs, including education, psychology, communications, math, engineering, microbiology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, ethnic studies, and the health sciences. We hope university instructors who are reading will be inspired to consider how you could connect your expertise with the needs and interests of the students in your courses, and in turn with the needs and interests of community members. We hope community members will be inspired to reach out to local universities to suggest possibilities as well.

The informal learning programs that are featured in this volume also vary in many ways. They involve diverse groups of young people, varying by age, race/ethnicity, national origin, and other forms of identity. They are located in a variety of spaces: a few are set in schools during the school day; others are after-school programs and clubs set in schools, public libraries, community centers, and more. All of the programs center the experiences of historically excluded, minoritized or marginalized communities, in situations of precarity and displacement; the nature of that marginalization differs based on local and national histories. Some of the partnerships have been in place for many years (e.g. Corre la Voz in Santa Cruz, California, Chap. 3; Y-PLAN in Berkeley, California, Chap. 15; and la Casa de Shere Rom and la Clase Mágica in Spain, Chap. 13) while some are just in formation (e.g. La Mia Scuola è Differente in Italy, Chap. 16). Others have been expanded, reimagined, and redesigned (e.g. Y-PLAN in San José, California, Chap. 14; and the UC Links program in Uruguay, Chaps. 17 in English and 18 in Spanish).

There is also tremendous variability in the specific pedagogies, practices, and activities that take place across the UC Links network. In this volume, you will read about authentic, dynamic, multimodal programs (Chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 10) that resist traditional approaches to the teaching of reading and writing. Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 detail programs that are transforming STEM subjects (math, science, and engineering). Chapter 19 details a program dedicated to restorative practices, health, and wellbeing.

These varieties of activities reflect the interests that faculty members brought to the partnerships as well as ones that evolved from our relationships with community members, as partners co-constructed the visions for each club. The researchers in our network also vary in where they put their research attention, and that is reflected in these chapters as well. Some look at the pedagogical arrangements of the activities we design and implement; some focus on children’s development; some concentrate on undergraduate learning. There is room for many areas of focus in these complex, multidimensional activity settings! One of the reasons for the success of the network activities, as we will illustrate, is that we see the whole as more than the sum of its parts, and we create room for participants to contribute according to their interests, capacities, needs, and desires; the model is collaborative, but also distributed, as we “tend to different areas of the farm” a metaphor that we prefer over the more common “divide and conquer.” (See the section on “A Word About Wording,” below.)

Origin Stories

This edited volume builds on a large body of scholarship about UC Links programs and the research that takes place within them. These publications have laid out the origin stories of the various programs in more detail than we can offer here. See especially Cole, 1996; Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006; Vásquez, 2003; and Underwood et al., 2021. We take as an important launch point Mara’s recent book (written with Charles Underwood, who was the founding and only Director of this network for 24 years before Mara took over in 2020, and Olga Vásquez, who, along with community partners, developed La Clase Mágica in San Diego). That book, A Cultural Historical Approach to Social Displacement and University-Community Engagement: Emerging Research and Opportunities (Underwood et al., 2021), describes the UC Links approach to university–community engagement as a strategy to respond to the urgent challenges of our time. Mara, Charles, and Olga lay out the origin story for UC Links and this “network” approach to social transformation as well as the theory that undergirds it. They present a comparative study of collaborative engagement in multiple programs, some that you will also read about in this book (Underwood et al., 2021). What makes this new volume different is that we hear directly from program research teams about their objectives, purposes, goals, activities, struggles, and successes, as they tell their own stories about their programs. We also hear reflections from UC Links participants who themselves are differently positioned within programs. Together, we conjoin our voices to tell a more comprehensive story than any of us could tell alone.

This is a story of vitality, life, and growth, as the seeds of an idea planted decades ago have taken root and grown in different forms. Sometimes, seeds fell in fertile soil where they quickly took root: for example in places where people understood the value of play for learning; where children’s voices were already centered and valued; and where the material and practical resources to support teaching and learning were abundant. More often, the conditions were much more harsh: in places where public education was undervalued and often under attack, where resources were limited, and where the kinds of educational practices we advocate for in this book are little understood. We show what can happen when the seeds of an idea take root in fertile soil, but also how they can flourish even in the cracks and in-between spaces, and then generate new seeds that scatter and find root in other parts. We begin with a brief history of that dissemination and germination process, before we introduce you to the overarching UC Links network, and fourteen of the programs that are growing and flourishing today.

Seedlings

The UC Links network is a complex activity system (Engeström, 1987; Engeström & Sannino, 2020), one that has evolved and changed over time. It’s not easy to narrate its history, but some sense of this evolution may help readers who are curious about the original sources of inspiration for the chapters in this volume. Our goal in this overview is to situate the current work in a broader, cultural historical context: to show how the current programs were shaped by those histories, in order to contemplate how they may continue to evolve in the face of ongoing sociocultural change. We also use this brief history to show the common intellectual, conceptual, and theoretical roots as well as the commitments that shape the programs we detail in this book, and the practices engaged in them. These commitments are ontological, that is, they are based on our beliefs about the nature of being, or how we want to be in the world. They are also epistemological: shaped by our beliefs about how we know things about the world. And they are ethical: forged by our values about how to act in the world.

The models of university–community partnerships and original seeds that helped germinate many of the programs that we describe in this volume were planted in the 1980s in Solana Beach, California. Michael Cole (Mike) and his colleagues at the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) and Olga Vásquez (Olga) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) formed partnerships with local schools and with members of a local Spanish-speaking Mexican community to search for a way to engage children who had been labeled as “learning disabled” in literacy-building activities. These initial programs were called the 5th Dimension (5th D) and La Clase Mágica (The Magical Class): names that invited participants to enter a new and magical dimension, with norms and activities that didn’t replicate those of school. Recognizing that many of the participating children had not been deemed successful in typical literacy tasks during the school day, the university and community partners began to explore after-school as a site for rich, expansive learning, even as they redefined the meanings of “success.”

These early programs also explored university classrooms and the associated after-school programs as learning environments for university, school, and community partners themselves. UC Links courses were designed with an explicit objective: to provide undergraduate and graduate students with real-world experiences directly connected to the concepts they are learning about in UC Links coursework. This was a response to calls in academia to link theory and practice, and to offer much-needed models for how to do this in substantive and meaningful ways. Too often, theory is relegated to the university, and practice to field sites, while students are left largely on their own to connect the two. By entwining theory-rich classes with activity in programs in the community, and reflecting on it, UC Links created ways for students, and all participants, to use theory, not just understand it. Understanding how this works for students has become one angle of inquiry (Ángeles et al., 2023; Macías-Gómez-Estern et al., 2014, 2021). We show some of those ways of connecting theory and practice through the writing of field notes and ethnographic observations in this book (Chaps. 6 and 13).

In order to better understand the connections between the original program models and the first UC Links programs that modeled themselves on this early work, and the present-day programs that you’ll read about in this volume (some of which are continuations of the early programs, and some of which have emerged much more recently), we next describe the intellectual and conceptual soil that nourished these original seedlings and allowed those and many others like them to take root: our core commitments.

Rooted in Play, Informal Learning, and Creative Activity Using Diverse Tools

The 5th D and La Clase Mágica were designed as after-school programs, which children participated in voluntarily. And so from the beginning, Mike and Olga knew that these programs needed to provide activities that were fun: not more “drill and kill” like the practices that were producing failure in school. A theoretical commitment to the value and importance of play, and a deep respect for the learning that happens in informal learning spaces, was part of the nutrient-rich soil that fed these early programs, and of the rhizomatic network that connects much of the work you will read in this volume. Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist whose ideas were translated into English by and also inspired Michael Cole, saw play as a primary driver for learning and development. It is in play that children engage in “leading activities”—activities that lead their development forward, allowing them to try on skills and competencies that are outside their current developmental zone. Vygotsky (1978) wrote, “In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself (p. 102).” Charles, Mara and Olga have referred to this as “deep play” and underscored its “serious” nature (Stetsenko & Ho, 2015; Underwood et al., 2021) in order to push against dominant cultural tropes that view play as frivolous and distinct from learning activities. At the same time, many of our contemporary programs are picking up on a cultural shift to call for more spaces of joy and lightheartedness, not just “serious work” (McKoy et al., 2021). See, for example, Chap. 15 detailing the work of the Berkeley Y-PLAN, and Chap. 6 about play at UCLA’s B-Club.

Cultural historical activity theory emphasizes the use of tools in making possible our activity as humans on the planet. By tools, we don’t just mean technological ones, but it’s important to note that the early UC Links programs were forged just as computers were entering schools. Mike and his colleagues saw the potential to use this new medium to create innovative and transformative learning environments (Cole et al., 2014). Technology served as a mediator and focus of joint activity that supported users in becoming producers, not consumers, of these cultural innovations. In the early years, both 5th D and La Clase Mágica activities included off-the-shelf computer games such as SimCity, an open-ended game that required reading, critical thinking and collaboration to successfully build sustainable cities. Importantly, children didn’t work alone on computers but instead worked collaboratively with peers as well as near-peer undergraduates in groups of two or three to navigate computer games and to create with these new tools. In many programs this practice has continued and even expanded. For example, the Learning to Transform Video Gaming Lab (LiTT Lab) engages young people, educators, undergraduates, community members, and researchers in the co-creation of video game platforms and ecologies to explore possible and equitable futures (Cortez et al., 2022).

Programs have also remained true to the original commitment of providing equitable access to technologies that youth in historically marginalized communities may not have at home. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when programs were forced to explore how to move in-person activities online, this became even more critical. (See a discussion of pandemic responses across the UC Links network in Chap. 2; in Uruguay in Chaps. 17 in English and 18 in Spanish; in Davis, California in Chap. 9; and Santa Barbara, California in Chap. 10.) At the same time, we have expanded both the kinds of technological tools we utilize in our programs (e.g. multimedia activities in Augsburg in Chap. 4 and the San Francisco Bay Area in Chap. 5, and the Beta Lab maker activities described in Chap. 9) and our ways of using them to emphasize creation and production over the consumptive practices that have proliferated in youth culture over the years.

Many UC Links programs have also reinvigorated older technologies like paper, paint, crayons, and paper, as caregivers look to us to help get their children OFF screens. In this volume, you will learn about programs that use a variety of cultural and technological tools, in a wide variety of ways. The focus is less on the tools themselves per se, but on how we use them together, and what we use them to do.

Rooted in Collaboration and Intergenerational Learning

Organizing the initial 5th D and La Clase Mágica after-school activities in groups that included both undergraduate students and young people was purposeful. It was driven by convictions about the profoundly social nature of learning, another key piece of DNA contained in the seeds of the original UC Links models. A continued shared commitment among UC Links programs is to collaboration and intergenerational learning. Working collaboratively provides opportunities for creating zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978)—or settings where new levels of learning, understanding, and development are possible by participating in joint activity. UC Links informal learning activities are designed to create room for participants to move from more “peripheral” to more “central” positions in those activities, and for both shifting and shared expertise. Importantly, undergraduates do not “teach” young people how to play computer games or solve any given challenge; they work and play and learn together, and build relationships in and through those activities.

Across UC Links activities, the roles of expert and novice are treated as flexible and shaped by activity, rather than based on age, status, or other hierarchical attributes (Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006). Often, young program participants have been attending the programs far longer than the undergraduates, because new undergraduates join each quarter or semester. Thus, kids provide continuity at the programs, and they are in the position of helping the undergraduates to learn about the program and program activities. This is one of many ways in which children are viewed and valued as experts, and one of the ways that we have turned a structural constraint (i.e. that undergraduates are partly tethered to the university calendar and its curricular demands) into a possibility: a way of creating more space for youth to exercise their expertise.

As an example, Mara likes to say, “Everything I learned about Microsoft Word I learned from sixth graders.” Mara was learning to use MS Word in 1996 when she was participating as a graduate student in an early UC Links program. At the Riverside Trolley after-school program she would sit with groups of sixth grade students and together they would play with Word Art, learn how to format letters, explore fonts and other tools that she now takes for granted. Intergenerational and mixed-age learning environments such as these also create room for participants to shift roles, as “novices” become “experts” and “experts” become guides to others. This is another important conceptual foundation for our work, and one that stands in contrast with the age-graded approach to Western schooling that was established with the rise of modernity (Rogoff, 2003).

Intergenerational spaces also allow room for participants to take on new roles over time. This accords with Barbara Rogoff’s (2003) notion of development as transformation in forms of participation. In addition to undergraduates and young people transforming from novices to experts in program activities, we create space for participants to take on different roles in the larger sociotechnical activity system. Thus, some youth participants from UC Links programs show up years later in the university classes (Chap. 12). Some community members, like Sayra Martinez, take on leadership roles within university–community partnerships (Chap. 12). Karla Trujillo started her journey with UC Links as a community partner, participated as an undergraduate in La Clase Mágica, worked as a student assistant in the UC Links Office at UC Berkeley, and is now pursuing her doctorate (Chap. 12). Some undergraduates go on to graduate school in partner universities. Mara started as a site-coordinator for the Riverside Trolley after-school program (a collaboration between faculty members at the University of California, Riverside and teachers and administrators at a local elementary school) when she was a graduate student and went on to become the Executive Director for UC Links. Other graduate students took their experiences into the world to forge new programs when they joined the professoriate themselves; for example, Tom Vogt and Jasmine Nation were both graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara and have gone on to develop innovative UC Links programs at the University of Augsburg in Germany (Chap. 4) and the California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo (Chap. 7). While doing her postgraduate studies, Mónica Da Silva encountered the Shere Rom project directed by José Luis Lalueza at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Chap. 13), and later took the model to Uruguay (Chaps. 17 in English and 18 in Spanish). Similarly, Beatriz Macías-Gómez-Estern visited La Clase Mágica in California originally as a PhD student, then as a postdoc, and later developed La Clase Mágica in Seville, Spain (Chap. 13). See Chaps. 11 and 12 for testimonials from other people who have transformed their participation in the UC Links network over time.

This commitment to collaboration and to co-creating non-hierarchical democratic environments with room for fluid and shifting forms of expertise is also embodied in the university–community partnerships that are at the center of our work. These partnerships recognize the varied forms of resources and expertise that both the university and community bring to the partnership and create transformative spaces for learning with community members. University and community partners engage in the process of co-defining program focus, activities and research topics of mutual interest and importance. This is not easy, especially given the different logics, logistics, and languages that shape the work of universities, public schools, and other community partners, and some of the authors in this volume discuss these challenges (e.g. Chap. 14 focused on the San José Y-PLAN).

Importantly, these programs do not function in isolation. They are connected through the root system of our network in ways that nurture and foster our mutual growth—much as has been shown to be true of forests. As Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (2013), forests are interconnected through mycorrhizae that form underground bridges connecting the trees. These networks help to distribute nutrients from tree to tree and “weave a web of reciprocity, giving and taking” (p. 20). (See also Wollehben, 2016.) This practice of grouping programs together into a network to learn with and from each other began with the place-based programs in San Diego and continued as the original seedlings began to scatter to other colleges and universities in California, throughout the United States and beyond, including to Europe and the Soviet Union. An early network of like-minded programs took root in 1991 with support from the Mellon Foundation. This group, which formally called itself the Distributed Literacy Consortium, and informally the Mellon Patch, worked together to explore the various ecologies that sustain 5th D activities. It included partners represented in this volume (Santa Barbara) as well as others from California, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, and North Carolina. During the years that the Mellon Foundation was funding this work, many of the programs developed deep roots in local communities and institutions. For example, at Appalachian State University in Boone North Carolina, the 5th D programs became an instrumental component in the teacher preparation program with the practicum course becoming part of the required teacher education curriculum (Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006). While the California programs were able to leverage additional funding to sustain their work, other programs did not secure ongoing funding, or weren’t able to navigate changes in leadership or departures of key university and/or community partners and activities eventually concluded imparting important lessons, for the Mellon Patch and beyond, related to the conditions necessary for growth.

Seeds from the Mellon Patch flew across California, the United States, and to almost every continent across the globe to seed the rich and biodiverse garden of UC Links. The UC Links network that exists today was forged in 1996 in response to institutional racism, as we detail below in our discussion of our approach to equity and diversity and in Chap. 2. It represents a collaborative and diverse group of university–community partnerships geographically distributed around the globe. (See “UC Links World Map” here: https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/chapter1.) There is a UC Links office in the Berkeley School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, which has connected, supported, and advocated for these diverse programs for almost 30 years. University undergraduates, young people of all ages, school and community partners, and faculty members from across the UC Links network come together in a variety of ways to learn with and from each other in a range of joint activities. For example, the UC Links Office hosts monthly virtual office hours where members of the UC Links network gather to problem solve, celebrate programmatic successes, and leverage the UC Links network’s body of knowledge, resources and best-practices. People who have just discovered UC Links programs might attend to learn more about these programs and the network. Others who have been part of the network for 20 years might share a new digital tool they’ve developed such as the Y-PLAN Digital Toolkit (https://y-plan.berkeley.edu/toolkit/). The international and intergenerational collaborations among university–community partnerships has resulted in joint activity including cross-program collaborations (Chap. 19); presentations at the annual international UC Links conference and other conferences; an international, cross-program UC Links Youth Summit (https://uclinksyouthsummit.carrd.co/), and the development of this edited volume. These and other collaborative practices and joint activity, like the mycorrhizae in the forest, form the underground bridges connecting programs throughout the UC Links network and continually weave the web of reciprocity.

Rooted in Social Justice and a Commitment to Diversity and Educational Equity

From the beginning, the 5th D and La Clase Mágica focused on responding to social exclusion, precarity and displacement in local communities, working with young people and families whose lives have been disrupted by larger forces of colonization and its ongoing effects in terms of institutionalized racism, migration, gentrification, ecological change, and cultural disruptions. Many times, such marginalized communities are right next door to universities. UC Links programs bring university resources (people, funding, and expertise) into collaborative work that leverages community strengths and knowledge to address structural inequities.

This commitment to social justice was key to the origins of the vision. Mike Cole and Olga Vásquez recognized the deep inequities that existed in the communities just outside of the affluent area of La Jolla, California where the University of California, San Diego is located. Mike and Olga also understood the importance of partnering with the local community to define and address existing educational and other inequities rather than, as is so much more common in social science research, trying to fix entrenched social issues from the outside. This model of community-based design research (Bang et al., 2010; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Booker, 2023; see also social design-based experimentation Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Gutiérrez et al., 2020) acknowledges the many ways in which academic scholarship as well as the learning of university undergraduate and graduate students can be enhanced by co-developing activities that leverage community Funds of Knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) as well as university and community resources and expertise. In this way, visions of social justice, equity and diversity are not predetermined; instead they emerge from our work with/in communities and are locally defined.

Even as we center issues of diversity in relation to the pursuit of equity and social justice, we also think about diversity in relation to learning and the design of our pedagogical practices. We start from the notion that the diversity of the human experience is a rich resource for learning and development, and that we all benefit from expanding our ways of thinking, learning, talking, doing, and being through this integrated and expansive learning process (Engeström, 2016). We recognize historical inequities in access to dominant cultural forms, and we know that nondominant ways have been stigmatized and often internalized as less valuable, proper, or correct than “dominant” cultural practices. We continuously push against the ways colonization has shaped our own ways of thinking, and help each other and our participants to imagine new possibilities and possible futures (Gutiérrez et al., 2019) as we all stretch outside our comfort zones.

With this commitment to social justice in its DNA, and with an approach to defining justice in locally specific ways, UC Links programs have also responded to changing sociohistorical conditions. In 1995, the sociocultural context in California demanded immediate and coordinated action to oppose statewide institutional racism. The University of California Board of Regents voted to eliminate affirmative action (i.e. taking race, ethnicity and sex into consideration to address historical underrepresentation) in university admissions. UC faculty, including Mike and Olga, recognized the importance of maintaining and increasing diversity and representation at the University and saw university–community partnerships, like those created through 5th D, La Clase Mágica, and others as an effective strategy for addressing deep and ongoing educational equities that could be implemented throughout the UC system and as an institutional commitment to equity. By early 1996, University–Community Links (UC Links) as a California network took root with seed funding and institutional support from the University of California Office of the President and UC Berkeley School of Education, the leadership and advocacy of longtime UC Links Executive Director Charles Underwood, and widespread commitment from university and community partners. In its first year, UC Links implemented 15 programs that engaged 25 faculty from nine University of California and two California State University campuses, over 700 young people from minoritized communities across the state, 125 undergraduates, and 25 graduate students throughout California. As of this writing, UC Links programs typically engage an annual average of 3000 young people and 700 undergraduate and graduate students in California alone.

This way of conceptualizing diversity is important for current-day struggles to create “culturally sustaining” (Paris & Alim, 2017) pedagogies and to address ongoing struggles for social justice in the many forms it takes. We recognize, for example, that the work of anti-racism looks different in different contexts, especially when we look across the world stage. Just who is seen in “deficit” terms within dominant discourse in different localities? Whose ways of thinking, knowing, doing and being are centered, and whose are marginalized, dismissed, ignored, or not seen? Who is constructed as “the other?” Understanding this helps us to plan our collaborative work with local partners. For example, our colleagues in Barcelona and Sevilla work closely with the Roma community, a historically marginalized and racialized group in Spain (Chap. 13). Many of the programs in California work with Spanish-speaking communities: both new immigrants and heritage language speakers on land that once belonged to Mexico (e.g. Corre la Voz in Chap. 3, and Nuestra Ciencia in Chap. 7). In Italy (Chap. 16), the focus is on new immigrants who are not accorded birthright citizenship status in that country. Our colleagues in Uruguay (Chaps. 17 in English and 18 in Spanish) also work with immigrants within the global south, including Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Looking across UC Links programs helps us to understand larger patterns of oppression around the world, and to see common ways in which humans have created systems of privilege and power, albeit ones that take different forms. This, in turn, may help us to imagine new ways of being in which we all expand our ways of knowing, and to model ways of organizing that resist creating new hierarchies of privilege and power. Our collective goal is to contribute to reimagining a world that is not defined by such hierarchies at all. Key to this is expanding the reach of our programs so that more people can experience this form of community-building, be inspired by it (as so many already have), and then bring these ways of being and doing into more places around the globe. Also important for this work is our ongoing reflection on how we can work from positions of relative privilege (e.g. in the university), mobilizing the resources made available to us in order to resist and actively disrupt that very privilege.

With this brief overview of the histories and core commitments that shape the present-day UC Links network, we turn our attention to the current moment and show how we are working within it to imagine a different future.

New Buds of Development

This book was envisioned as the world entered the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic: a global event that impacted our programs—and all of us—in huge, consequential and varied ways. It constrained many of our activities, especially at local levels. We could no longer meet face-to-face with undergraduates or work alongside youth in person. We had to rethink our approach to the use of tools and materials. Relationships shifted as well. All of these things pressed against our core values and ways of thinking about learning as collaborative, embodied, relational, and very much grounded in particular places and spaces in the world.

At the same time, the pandemic also opened up new possibilities, or made those possibilities more visible. True to a cultural historical perspective, we came to see how sociocultural changes introduced modifications to our own uses of tools. Many UC Links programs used digital technologies to build and transform our clubs into virtual spaces. Technology became a tool to sustain our network relationships—and also, sometimes, to enhance them, as suggested in the opening vignette. We became more skilled and practiced in developing engaging virtual activities and ways of building on-line communities (Chap. 2). We realized that time and space were more malleable than we had appreciated, and that we could connect over long distances without the cost of time and travel. We came to see the value in connecting even briefly for virtual “coffee hours” or roundtable sessions to share what was happening in our locales, discuss challenges we were facing, collectively problem solve—leveraging knowledge from around our international network of programs—and, importantly, to connect and uplift each other. The idea for this edited volume was born in one of these coffee hours.

Our Writing Process: Slow Scholarship

Edited volumes typically recruit authors to prepare drafts of chapters on their own time, in isolation from each other. Coherence is achieved through whatever guidelines are offered, and in the editing of chapter drafts. But we wondered: why not put our core commitments into practice and collaborate all along the way? This was what sparked the initial Zoom session that we described in our opening vignette. Our intention was not just to ensure that we would complete the chapters for this volume. Instead, we embraced the writing process as an opportunity to engage in joint activity and learn about each other’s programs in more in-depth and substantive ways than we had been able to, to date. This sustained conversation would help our ongoing work of connecting theory and practice locally and at the same time provide more coherence to the volume, helping to make theoretical and programmatic connections across programs. Finally, we hoped it would make the writing itself more fun, far less painful than slogging away on our own. We would reflect on our process as we engaged in it, and draw some “meta” lessons about the writing and thinking process that could further enhance our work.

We wanted to be as inclusive as possible of all who would want to contribute to this vision. We shared an email on the UC Links listserv inviting participants from all UC Links programs as well as others around the world that were either inspired by UC Links or that have sought us out as kindred spirits. Not all programs were able to respond to this call at this time. The timing may not have been ideal for partners to come together to tell their stories. Some stories may be too fragile or tentative to tell as of yet. Some programs were in the midst of navigating ongoing transitions, still reimagining programs and partnerships after years of pandemic impacts. However, their influences are here in spirit, in the impacts they have had on other programs, and sometimes in the footnotes. In addition to the programs represented in this volume, many UC Links programs are represented in previously published books, edited volumes, and articles as well on the UC Links website (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/).

In the first meeting that we described in the opening vignette, we presented the idea of “slow scholarship” (Hartman & Darab, 2012): an approach to scholarly work that allows time for ideas to percolate rather than succumbing to the academic pressure to “publish or perish.” This seemed especially important given that all of the authors of this volume were very busy transforming and continually reinventing local programs to respond to dynamic pandemic conditions and managing myriad other responsibilities, including other writing projects. We likened this “slow” approach to cooking on a stove top, with multiple pots on different burners. This volume began simmering on a back burner, with an agreement to give this pot a stir at least every month, in the workshop space that we established on Zoom. In between, we would let the ideas simmer, or stir them on our own. Together, we would slowly bring the chapters in this volume to a boil—or a gentle simmer (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1
An illustration presents the idea of slow scholarship by gathering ingredients, stirring the pot, and simmering. This includes joining in collaborative activity, initiating the edited volume, reading and writing individually, reviewing each other's chapters, revising, and monthly writing workshops.

Slow scholarship

Full size image

After managing to find a time that worked for people spread across multiple continents and a range of time zones, we established the practices described in the opening vignette, creating a space for joint activity that built conversation both within and across program teams. We began with a general outline of what each chapter would look like, and began slowly to develop them, from opening vignettes to program descriptions to the key ideas that we wanted to develop. As in all our work, our goal was to integrate theory and practice, to experiment with different ways of organizing for joint activity, and to play with possibilities for expanding our ways of seeing, understanding, thinking, doing and creating together. We worked with both new and ancient tools and technologies (Zoom meetings, Google docs, and guided meditation/centering activities), trying out different ways of drawing inspiration, vetting our ideas, sharing our work, and fine-tuning. We created shared Google Drive folders for the artifacts of each session—agendas, Zoom recordings, transcripts, chat narratives so anyone who missed a workshop could always follow along. These became material for us to reference between sessions—and for those who were not able to make our meetings—as well as data to document our process. We also met in person during our annual meeting, sitting around a table with good food…and with a few participants joining us by Zoom.

In other words, we tried to make the process of writing this volume as fully collaborative as possible—and also enjoyable, or fun. The same was true for our editorial team. We had countless online meetings as well as in-person ones, first with just Mara and Marjorie, and later with John, who joined our editorial team in 2023, and finally with the assistance of two UCLA graduate students (Micaela Bronstein and Jackson Gzehoviak) for the preparation of the final manuscript. In Chap. 20, Jackson and Micaela share their experiences and the inspiration that they will take into their own futures as educational researchers.

A Word About Wording

All language is fraught with contradiction; there are no perfect words or labels that will escape our sociocultural histories or of the inequities that shaped them. But as much as possible, we tried to write with clarity and intention, paying attention to the words we chose and the histories that they may encode. In our writing workshops, chapter authors discussed our choices of labels for program participants (in terms of their gendered, generational, aged, national, regional and racial/ethnic identities, among other things.) We recognize that labels matter, insofar as they help us to see how we think about categories of people: sometimes reinforcing stereotypes and making assumptions invisible, and sometimes opening up new understandings. Yet participants in UC Links programs, and others who work with them, may have different preferences for the terms they choose to label themselves or other groups. For example, chapters use various acronyms to represent gender and/or sexual identities (e.g. LGBTQIA+, LGBTQIA2S+), ethnic backgrounds (e.g. Latino, Latine, Latinx, Chicanx). As much as possible, we tried to honor the labels that the people who are represented in these chapters would choose for themselves. At the same time, we use labels that reflect contemporary thinking about the most inclusive, culturally appropriate, and respectful labels that may help open up new understandings about histories and relations of power, and promote new ways of thinking. It is likely impossible to find words that will satisfy all readers and that will hold across the international contexts of our work as well as stand the test of time. Sometimes we offer several terms rather than single ones, in order to remind readers to hold the meanings of all of these labels lightly and to see more fully their socially constructed nature.

We discussed other language choices as well. For example, we sought to avoid using language that indexes violence, such as “target,” “aim,” “seize,” or even “impact.” In our written language as well as in our thinking about our work, we checked our use of common metaphors like “divide and conquer” and “killing two birds with one stone.” We substituted “buts” with “ands” wherever possible, to suggest possibility and abundance over limitation. We tried to avoid using “our” programs or “our” participants so we didn’t convey appropriation or ownership (though we recognize that collective pronouns like we/our can also signal affiliation). We used caregivers and families, rather than parents, to represent inclusive relationships and familial constellations. We also present some chapters and excerpts of chapters as they were written—originally in Spanish. We consciously included some phrases in Spanish and also in German without explicit translation, trusting that the reader has enough context for understanding. We introduce new terms and concepts in italics upon their first use and for emphasis. We do not italicize non-English words throughout the volume in an effort to normalize translingual practices. The UC Links network is a multilingual community and we appreciate being able to have some of that richness represented in this volume, especially the two contributions originally authored in Spanish (Chaps. 12 and 18.)

Audience

We wrote these chapters with multiple audiences in mind. First, we encouraged authors of each of the chapters to think about this edited volume as a way to explain their work to current partners or potential university or community partners, the undergraduate and graduate students who enroll in the university courses connected to these programs, and colleagues and peers at their own institutions. We hope these chapters will allow the authors in their local contexts to make more visible the complexity of the work they do designing and running these programs, while also teaching courses that are linked to them, and researching their effects.

Other readers may be other university educators, a bit more removed from the local programs: people who seek models of “service-learning” or community-engaged undergraduate education. This volume offers many possible models, and helps to ground them in specific processes and practices. You may have questions that are not answered directly in each chapter, but we point to many other resources for learning as well. We would be thrilled if these chapters inspire you to start programs of your own. We offer examples of programs at different stages of development that may help you get started.

We hope that community members and those running or planning to develop local in-school or after-school programs will read about these programs as well. We have included testimonials from participants with a wide range of experiences in order to bring in more voices and perspectives, to inform and inspire. We are pleased that we can offer the book at no cost via Open Access, and we urge readers to share it in whole or in part with others.

With these diverse audiences in mind, we encouraged authors to write in clear, detailed, and accessible ways, trying to make visible many things that they may take for granted but that outside audiences may not know. All of the work that is represented in these pages is strongly grounded in theories of learning, but we didn’t want the chapters to get weighed down by too much theory, so we have “off-loaded” some of that conceptual work into this introduction. We encourage you to keep the theories that are presented upfront in mind as you read through and see different instantiations of theory-into-practice.

You may choose to read selectively, starting with chapters that are focused on subject matter that is most of interest to you. Or perhaps you’ll choose to start with the “testimonials” that are presented in Chaps. 11 and 12, to hear more directly from diverse participants in the programs. The chapters could have been ordered in many different ways, because there are many overlaps in the themes they address. And, together they make up more than the sum of their parts. We offer this collection of chapters as examples of “university-community partnerships in the wild:” illustrating how people work, play, struggle, dance, succeed (and sometimes fail) across a wide range of contexts and with varied histories. We do not pretend to prescribe one “right way” to engage in the work of university–community partnerships or to design programs. We hope you will draw many ideas by reading across the chapters, and putting them together in your own way.

Resistance, Renewal, and Transformative Education

The theme of transformation, through resistance and renewal, runs through all the chapters in the volume. The programs we describe are planting and nurturing seeds of resistance to entrenched challenges, to the status quo, to dominant paradigms of teaching and learning, and to forces of marginalization, stultification, oppression, inequality, and injustice. They resist school structures that divide people (by age, language, presumed abilities, and more) and subject matter, and that separate minds and bodies, heads and hearts, work and play, learning and fun. They resist the pressures of the academy to privilege scholarship over teaching and service, and to separate the three. Simultaneously, they nurture seeds of renewal: of imagination, creativity, wellbeing, connection, belonging, hope, justice, equity, and possibility. Together the chapters illuminate paths toward transformation: of pedagogies, learning ecologies, communities, schools, and lives.

There are many overlaps among the chapters, but we have opted to group them into five sections. In the first section (Transformative Histories), we present this overview of the UC Links network: its history, core commitments, and variations in the forms it has taken. In the next chapter we dig deeper into that history and show how the network has responded to sociocultural circumstances, changing technologies, and the needs and interests of local communities as well as university partners. We consider both affordances and constraints that were engendered during the COVID-19 pandemic and how they have transformed and created possibilities for the ways we work, play, and learn together.

The second section (Transforming Pedagogies) gives us a view into eight of the network’s current programs: relatively new ones, like Nuestra Ciencia in San Luis Obispo, California, and well-established ones, such as Santa Barbara, California. They illustrate innovative approaches to the teaching and learning of literacies and language (Chaps. 3–7), microbiology (Chap. 7), ecology (Chap. 10), engineering (Chap. 9), and math (Chap. 8). These programs model forms of resistance to traditional pedagogies and offer a range of transformative possibilities.

In the third section (Transforming Learning & Transforming Lives), we hear directly from some of the thousands of people who have participated in UC Links programs over the years. These first-person narrative accounts include voices of young people from UC Links programs, some of whom have gone on to participate as college student mentors to the next generation of young people; as well as other undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and community members. In the first of the two chapters that we cluster in this section (Chap. 11), we hear how these experiences transformed participants’ ways of thinking about teaching and learning, engaging with local communities, connecting theory and practice, and conducting research. In the second chapter of this section (Chap. 12), we hear how UC Links has transformed lives: by creating opportunities for changing forms of participation by members who have taken on different roles and identities in the network over time and by both inspiring aspirations and opening pathways to college, careers and life.

The fourth section (Transforming Learning Ecologies) illuminates the network’s connections to communities around the world, and ways of transforming learning ecologies by bringing together differently positioned people to work on local issues in new ways. This includes projects with long histories, rooted in particular places (Spain, in Chap. 13, San José in Chap. 14, San Rafael in Chap. 15); ecologies that are being forged in the context of new immigration (Italy in Chap. 16, Uruguay in Chaps. 17 in English and 18 in Spanish); and transnational connections (Uganda in Chap. 19). Together these chapters show how individual wellbeing, joy, and self-care can be integrated with care of community, and collaborative efforts to transform those communities.

The final section (Transforming Futures) consists of just one chapter. We hear from two new educational scholars who worked with us on the final leg of the two-year journey that led to this volume. Jackson Gzehoviak and Micaela Bronstein offer a fresh perspective on the work described in this volume, including as it relates to their own educational journeys as well as engaged scholarship more broadly. We hope their closing commentary will inspire other emerging scholars and educators to keep imagining transformative educational futures.

Our purpose in sharing these stories is to motivate others who might want to forge new partnerships and programs, bring some of these ideas into other learning contexts, and imagine new educational possibilities. We hope we will inspire young people, researchers, community members, practitioners and policy makers. We hope these seeds of both resistance and renewal will germinate widely in the world.

Resistance is important. Without resistance, we may find ourselves tugged by forces much larger than ourselves. The seeds we plant may be carried off by powerful winds. We need to be strong enough to withstand those winds, digging our collective roots deep into the soil, creating scaffolds of support, similar to how corn, pole beans, and squash form the Three Sisters of companion planting (Marsh, n.d.), banding together to help seedlings grow, thrive, and survive.

At the same time, there is a danger in only resisting, without offering possibilities for renewal as well. Our goal in this book is not just to critique the existing structures of schooling, or just to name the inequities that abound in the world. Instead, we offer seeds of possibility. We show how things could be done differently, and how we could collectively inspire each other to imagine things we might never have dreamed were possible on our own.

We write this volume during a time of increasing precarity, uncertainty, polarization, inequity, and social upheaval both in the United States and around the world. As many schools focus on “returning to normal” in the new endemic period, and “catching students up” on the learning that was “lost” during the period of school closures, we suggest a different way for educational futures. Sharing how programs innovated during this time, we consider how constraints can sometimes be turned into affordances. We suggest ways of sustaining some of the new things that came into view during this time: the possibilities that emerged, and the learning that happened not just despite the pandemic, but because of it. We also offer models of educational transformation that have adapted in other ways during the last three decades, that have survived, thrived, and seeded new possibilities. We hope readers will be inspired by these models of transformative education and that you will plant some seeds of your own.