Nina is a psychology undergraduate student aged 22 who participated one day a week during a semester in one of the sites of the Shere Rom Project. This is a translation of her field note (originally written in Spanish)Footnote 1 for the last day of activity. Undergraduate students participated as “helpers” or mentors in an activity where they collaborated with the kids attending Shere Rom to create videos:

“It is the last session in the computer lab and the children’s faces express a mixture of feelings. It’s a strange feeling—after having gotten used to going to school once a week—to know that coming here will no longer be part of my routine. Even though the time we have shared with the children has been short, it has been enough to create a powerful connection—all the other undergraduates share the same feeling. We can see the sad faces in the kids as they arrive. Each of us [undergraduate students] makes a group and invites the kids to sit next to us, as if we were asking them to be together on that day of farewell.

I notice Anna is a little distant, like she was lost in her thoughts, and I get closer to her. She tells me that she and her family have moved, that she used to sleep in the same bed with her brother, and that three family members used to share one small room. She tells me that she feels lonely and that she finds it difficult to sleep at night due to lack of habit. I comfort her by sharing similar experiences I had when I was around her age and get her to smile a little.

We all talk while other members of the group write the letters to @MacFootnote 2 and Anna tells me that at some point in the session we will have to leave the room because she has a surprise for me. After assuring her that I will see the surprise—I focus on the kids who are engrossed in the task of writing (many of them trying to do it simultaneously on the same keyboard). I’m a little disappointed that Iván and Gisella fight over typing, and propose that they split up and take turns on the task [but this] doesn’t seem to work. They snatch it out of each other’s hands and I ask Anna to help them calm down. However, Anna doesn’t seem too keen to intervene or take part in the discussion either. Finally, after insisting that both of them tell the other what they are going to do during their holidays, they both give up fighting and calm is established.

Once the recorded scenes and those that are pending to be recorded have been written, it is time for the kids to take turns using the computers to write a letter to @Mac. My group takes a little longer to finish their writing so by the time they are done there are no more computers available. I ask one of the children from another group if she can get together with someone else and share the computer with my group, but she refuses. I don’t know how to react—as I was expecting a positive response—but then the girl sitting next to her stands up, offering hers. I really appreciate the gesture and the four of us sit in front of a screen.

Gisella and Iván surprise me a bit because of the difficulties that I face in getting them to collaborate together, not knowing the real origin of their argument. However, the fact that Iván is more willing to participate in the activity than on other days makes me happy. It is even more significant that I did not have to encourage him to do so, but rather he took the initiative. I hope that he will continue to show interest and initiative in participating actively going forward. I do not know definitively which aspects have improved and which have not after the course of the sessions, but this seemed to me one of the most important and if it has been achieved it would be much more than an achievement.

The moment when the children announce that they have a surprise for the undergraduate students—and give us an envelope with personalized drawings—was extremely emotional. It rains hugs and kisses. Then, we [undergraduate students] take a step aside to read their letters and see their drawings—the atmosphere changes radically: suddenly the affective bond has grown and we also give them a present that we had prepared for them. They are all very happy and sad at the same time—even the shyest kids approach each of the undergraduate students and confess that they will miss us.

When snack time arrives, all kids disperse with their best friends within the class. It is not until the moment of delivering the gifts that we all get together, although it seems that Iván was only present physically (he is by our side but with his back turned to us, looking anywhere and with his mind in the clouds). We all ask him to turn around so we can talk and that’s how we get his focus to return. I am surprised by the drawings (which show their dedication and effort) and I am really moved by the thoughtful messages that they included in their drawings. I hug them and the kids are very happy that I liked their drawings. Then I surprise them by giving them the photos we have taken and they thank me for the present. Shortly after I am dragged out of the classroom by Anna so that she can give me a surprise. We sit on a staircase at the end of the hall and she sings a song to me that was written by her mother. She has an amazing voice and the lyrics are about a farewell that implies not forgetting—adding even more emotion to the act. She leaves me really stunned and I tell her repeatedly how much I loved her song and that she has a great talent. Her gesture causes me to immediately want to give her kisses and hugs to express how grateful I am that she dedicated the song to me. I promise her that I will never forget her gift. She accepts the offer and answers that it will also be impossible for her to forget me.

Human relationships require time and knowledge of the other person to be able to have a deep understanding of them and to make these relationships have a significant meaning to us. When it comes to relationships with children, the time to build rapport is reduced. Suddenly, every day we see each other becomes a much more meaningful act, even if no one talks about it. Mainly, it strikes me when Iván tells me—at the time of saying goodbye—that he is going to miss me. For a few fractions of a second I am speechless, since until this day I had not seen such a show of affection from him, nor did I expect a similar gesture from him or such a strong hug. I knew that he was not like the girls—who in the third session already hugged me and were excited to see me—so it was even more significant. Verbalizing feelings is something that even I find difficult on a day-to-day basis—especially when you do not know how the other might react, among a few other reasons)—this being one more reason why I attribute greater value to his words.

Once we have all finished this task, the children sit at the tables in the center of the classroom and look at us expectantly (they remind me a little of the looks we could see in the first session, before the confusion of not knowing what was to come). Then we explain that the surprise is to have a snack all together, sharing what the students and coordinators have brought. Their faces light up when they see the chocolate chip cookies, pastries, and chips. I am especially struck by the reaction of Morad, one of the children of Arab origin, who asks—pointing to each of the foods—whether or not it contains pork. It is a kind of cultural shock, in the sense that at no time had I even considered that any of the children might have any difficulty eating any of the food that was brought in. Luckily, most things didn’t have pork—he just looks disappointed when he finds out that the croissants do. Quickly the rest of the children devour everything they can. Some of them asked right away if it was possible to get seconds and we refilled the empty plates”.

(Nina’s field note, December 17, 2015; translation, originally in Spanish)

Introduction

The Shere Rom Project in Barcelona and the Clase Mágica in Seville derive from the experiences of university-community collaboration in San Diego (la Clase Mágica) and Barcelona (la Casa de Shere Rom). They both involve transformation processes in schools that have suffered social and ethnic segregation, in which Roma and immigrant students are concentrated due the “white flight.” They are inter-institutional projects in which the goals and practices of different institutions such as universities, public schools, and neighborhood entities converge in a new context of activity with their own goals and practices. They also have an intercultural dimension, insofar as the university undergraduate students from the hegemonic cultural group meet mostly Roma minority boys and girls, and others from other countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. And also intergenerational, with participants at very different moments of their life cycle (school students between childhood and adolescence, university students in training, and expert professionals among school teachers and university researchers), with very different goals and aspirations. The projects are therefore hybrid contexts of activity, which constitute new practices differentiated from those typical of the original contexts (university, school, community, etc.).

What we intend in our chapter is to show how participants learn and transform themselves in this type of hybrid context of activity. That is to say, how, starting from a previous differentiated trajectory, entering the activity with different motivations, with different ways of acting, with different conceptions of the world; and by interacting through collaboration, establishing effective connections, jointly involving in shared tasks, and creating new meanings, the participants learn and are transformed. For this we will focus on university students, following their field notes.

The vignette we have shared as an introduction to our chapter is an excerpt from a field note written by Nina (a pseudonym) after her last visit to the Barcelona project. Nina was a psychology undergraduate student in the 2015–2016 academic year. Her writing exemplifies the transformational processes that stem from the participation in our projects, as they are experienced by the undergraduate students who participate in them through their reflective writing in their field notes.

Program Context

Shere Rom began in 1998 as a community of practice promoted by our research group in the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in collaboration with the Badalona Roma Association. The collaboration had been established through a publication co-authored by researchers from the group and members of the same association (Cerreruela, et al. 2001). This publication on Roma culture, a marginalized group throughout Europe (San Roman, 1986), was part of an action-research that sought to overcome the classic asymmetric and ethnocentric models of social science research (Crespo et al., 2002). The shared knowledge between university researchers and Roma activists regarding the educational needs of the community was the foundation of La Casa de Shere Rom, an educational activity where Roma children and adolescents could learn free from assimilationist pressures and deficit conceptions (Crespo et al., 2005).

Throughout 20 years of community-university collaboration, Shere Rom has been implemented in 17 locations inside and outside schools in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area: eight schools, three institutes, one institute-school (the current collaboration), three Roma associations, one civic center, and one public library (Padrós et al., 2014; Lalueza et al., 2020).

At the end of the 2016–2017 school year, Shere Rom was taking place simultaneously in four educational centers and four locations outside school. But faced with the impossibility of maintaining a network without sufficient financial support, Shere Rom moved toward a model of school-university collaboration with a school that wanted to radically transform itself that same year: the El Til⋅ler institute-school (Bon Pastor, Barcelona).

El Bon Pastor is a neighborhood created in 1929 around the nucleus of “cheap houses” built to house the workers who had come to Barcelona for the construction of the metro and the Universal Exhibition and who, until then, had lived in shacks or informal buildings. Wedged between a river, a railway line, and a locomotive factory, this neighborhood was isolated for decades from the rest of the city, and home to a large number of Roma families. Despite urban transformations since the recovery of the democratic councils in 1979, which allowed the connection of the neighborhood with the rest of the city, it continues to be a low-income area, and in the last 30 years it has been nourished by immigrant populations coming from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, although maintaining an important core of Roma population and also of white working-class autochthonous population.

The El Til⋅ler institute-school, which caters to students between the ages of 3 and 17 (preschool, primary, and compulsory secondary), asked the research group of the UAB to accompany them in the process of change to guarantee student’s successful completion of compulsory education, and, in turn, reverse the strong stigmatization of the center. The objectives of this collaboration were to:

  • make school internships a meaningful experience for students;

  • facilitate dialogue about practices, meanings, and goals between the school and the learners, their families, and their communities;

  • promote a critical practice of intercultural education.

This new stage of the Shere Rom Project has been carried out by adopting a Funds of Knowledge (González & Moll, 2002; Moll et al., 1992) and Funds of Identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014; González-Patiño & Esteban-Guitart, 2021) approach. Thus, early childhood education teachers (of children ages 3–6 years) were accompanied in exploring the Funds of Knowledge of their students’ families, with the creation of a study group on cultural diversity and family practices, visits to students’ homes, and joint construction with their families of new activities. The continuity of the Shere Rom Project has consisted mainly in the integration of the intergenerational participation model of the Fifth Dimension and the methodological strategies of Identity Funds in the new Identit.art project, for which each academic year, a group of between 15 and 18 undergraduate students participate 1 day a week from October to May, each leading a group of three or four students from the school.

Identit.art is an activity for children and adolescents from 10 to 15 years old (fifth- and sixth-grade of elementary school and first, second, and third-grade of secondary school) in collaboration with university students, identifying objects, people, spaces, and symbols connected with identities of the former, and using artistic creation as a process to build narratives that provide multimodal tools to construct subjectivities. It is intended to link contents and social skills with the situated knowledge of the apprentices, always based on artistic techniques. With this proposal, a space for inquiry and questioning is fostered on issues related to the different forms of discrimination and oppression that affect the lives of students (Zhang Yu et al. 2021).

Thus, in the 2022–2023 academic year, for groups of 12- to 14-year-olds, the proposal involved working on migrations in a way that allowed understanding the historical, economic, climatic, political, and other reasons why people migrate. The starting point was the experience of kids, through the collection of personal objects and family narratives, as well as the identification of specific territories and places, followed by the artistic expression of these elements and discussion based on them. Finally, in collaboration with the school’s teachers, they were integrated into the curricular content. The work was brought back to the neighborhoods in the form of exhibitions or artistic installations.

The group of 14- to 15-year olds collaborated in this course, in addition to pregrade students, with the Bon Pastor Public Library and the Rromane Siklǒvne Association (an educational Roma NGO) in the recovery of the historical memory of the neighborhood. To do this, a map of the neighborhood has been created and will be exhibited in the library, in which stories of the people of the neighborhood will be included, as well as their own stories, located in specific places. As a result, the Library will have a large map in which small boxes will be placed that will offer popular stories that tell about life in the neighborhood, as well as a digital reproduction that can be consulted online (Fig. 13.1).

Fig. 13.1
A top-view photo of 4 colorful posters with stars, numerals, handwritten foreign-language texts, and drawings. They are placed on a wooden floor.

Some artwork designed in the Identit.art program in Shere Rom

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La Clase Mágica in Seville began in the 2012–2013 academic year, as a pilot experience in the Social Education Degree at the Pablo de Olavide University. The project was an iteration of La Clase Mágica’s original idea in San Diego (Vásquez, 2003) where a researcher in the Sevilla team had been actively involved (Macías-Gómez-Estern & Vásquez, 2014, 2015). The pilot experience consisted of a year-long negotiation with different educational agents in Polígono Sur, an historically marginalized neighborhood in Seville,Footnote 3 southern Spain, to set the bases of our collaboration. Our motivation was not to interfere in the social transformation and educational processes going on in the neighborhood, establishing collaborative networks that could add value in a meaningful way to the already existing activism (Macías-Gómez-Estern & Vásquez, 2014).

After this period of negotiation, we implemented the project with a service learning methodology in the first semester of the Social Education degree. Nowadays the project is being run in various psychology classes in different programs (Social Work, Social Education, and Sociology) at the Faculty of Social Sciences Pablo de Olavide University. Some of these classes are taught in English, hosting international students from different European universities under the Erasmus + program. In La Clase Mágica, university undergraduate students collaborate with educational centers in Polígono Sur. We have maintained a long-term collaboration with a preschool and primary school center (CEIP Andalucía) and an adult education center (CEPER Polígono Sur).

CEIP Andalucía is a public center of preschool and primary education. It was constituted as a Community of Learning (CoL) in 2006, and mostly Roma children attend it. Being a CoL implies implementing a Freirean-based educational methodology, in which different actors participate, and all are involved in the educational process: neighborhood residents, caregivers, teachers, volunteers, university students, and students of the center. Everyone learns together, participates in the classroom, has a voice, and can make decisions. Egalitarian and horizontal dialogues are key to the educational process (Aubert et al., 2009; Kleine-Kracht, 1993; Lalueza et al., 2019).

Students from the Faculty of Social Sciences participate as collaborators and helpers in different educational activities in CEIP Andalucía and CEPER Polígono Sur, as part of their higher education training. They attend the school during one semester, learning interdisciplinarily through service learning (SL) methodology. This methodology involves learning from practice, but not just any practice, but a community practice, through service to the community. All the subject matters of the semester are integrated in this project: bases of human psychological functioning, didactics of social education, foundations of anthropology, foundations of sociology, lifespan developmental psychology, cognitive bases of social interaction and communication and social pedagogy. All incorporate teaching activities that connect theory with the service performed by students, generating significant conceptual learning and providing tools of analysis of reality for reflection and learning from the methodology of SL.

The community service performed by the students involves their attendance at the center for 7–10 weeks (depending on the class and degree), 2 hours each week, collaborating in interactive groups in the classroom, which are one of the successful actions implemented in the CoL (Fig. 13.2). These interactive groups are made up of four or five students; different thematic activities are developed in them, each activity being coordinated by an adult. Normally, there are three or four adults per classroom, including the teachers, so that while collaborative learning is worked on, teaching is as individualized as possible. The classes are extremely heterogeneous, finding children with very different educational levels in the same class. Each student at the university is assigned to a specific class and timetable, so they have a reference group at all times.

Fig. 13.2
A photo of a group of 4 women who walk on a road beside a large building. Another girl walks behind them towards the same road. A car is parked along the roadside on the right.

La Clase Mágica-Sevilla undergraduate international students walk along the neighborhood on their first visit to the school

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University students must write a field note every day they attend the program, in which they report about what has happened that day in as much detail as possible. Field notes also include a reflection on two levels. On the one hand, a theoretical reflection, in which they should use the concepts they are working on in class relating them to practice, so that a better understanding of both levels is possible. This allows them to deepen their disciplinary learning, apprehending concepts in a more real and authentic way. On the other hand, and no less important, they must make a personal reflection where they have to comment on their sensations, emotions generated, personal perceptions, experiences, prejudices, doubts, and questions. The field notes are therefore an essential part of the project, which contribute to the consolidation of disciplinary learning. At the same time they constitute a tool for building identity, where students must reflect on themselves and on the other people with whom they participate (Arias-Sánchez et al., 2018; García-Romero et al., 2018).

As part of their learning, university students must produce a short film about the experience, which is screened at the end of the course for the entire university community. The school too is invited to come to the university to join us in the celebration.

Key Ideas

We conceptualize the interventions developed within the framework of the Shere Rom Project and La Clase Mágica Seville as “hybrid contexts of activity” (Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2021). They arise from interactions between participants who simultaneously act as agents in different activity systems, their “original systems.” Thus, university students are participating in a university activity (generated by their university, directed at developing knowledge and skills typical of the university curriculum), but at the same time they must respond to the requirements of the host institution and its professionals and the educational, social, and affective needs of children and adolescents with whom they enter into action. In other words, they participate in a hybrid system that responds to the goals, procedures, rules, and roles of two different activity systems (in our case, the university and the schools), which implies the creation of new goals, procedures, rules, and roles, distinct to, but not disconnected from, the original systems (Lalueza & Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2020).

An interesting feature of these hybrid systems is that, while the original systems (such as the university and the school) are strongly institutionalized with very clear goals and highly institutionalized procedures, the resulting hybrid system has a low level of institutionalization. Students’ goals, their practices, and the roles of the participants are constantly redefined in relation to the contradictions that emerge when having to respond to the goals of different systems. And that process, which requires constant negotiation, allows constant innovation.

Another characteristic of this system of activity is the character of joint activity based on the legitimation of the diverse motives of its diverse participants. University students, researchers, school teachers, and their pupils (children and adolescents) participate from different motivations that can generate collaborations that complement it or develop contradictions questioning the activity. In a rigidly institutionalized system, contradictions are solved by imposing goals, practices, and roles, with the expectation that the participants will have to adapt to this mandate through the corresponding disciplinary procedures. However, the activity that we present here is based on the legitimization of the various agendas and the creation of an environment that responds satisfactorily to them, in what in Kris Gutierrez’s terms would be a “third space” (Gutierrez, 2008). So, the participants must weave an intersubjectivity that supposes the construction of shared meanings and also shared goals.

This hybrid system of activity in constant transformation is a learning environment for all participants, but we are analyzing here exclusively the group of university students. The field notes prepared by these students, such as the one illustrated in the opening vignette of this chapter, allow us to trace an itinerary of learning and personal transformation through participation in the activity, which broadly follows the stages prefigured in the model of Transformative Learning (Mezirow, 1997). The Transformative Learning Model helps us to understand a series of critical incidents derived from the contradictions experienced by our undergraduate students when entering a system of activity whose rules differ from the systems of origin (the institutional framework of the university activity, the cultural framework of the community, and family of origin). This is a situation of “dissonance,” that is to say, of rupture of the expectations and scripts based on the contexts of previous activity. A new situation in which the student accesses other ways of interpreting reality and legitimizing behavior, but also a new situation that requires new responses because the routines learned in other contexts do not work. This situation generates confusion, doubts, and rethinking, that can be the basis of a reflective process. In the following excerpt (Lalueza & Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2020) we show some traces of this process in a student from La Clase Mágica Sevilla:

My experience on the first day impressed me a lot since even though I imagined finding myself in similar situations, I didn’t think that the students had so many curricular shortcomings or that the alternative methodology would work so well (…) On the one hand, what particularly struck me was the fact that the students would leave the classroom without the teacher’s permission when they didn’t feel comfortable or got angry (…) I had never been in a situation like that, and to be honest I found it really frustrating not being able to do anything to calm the teacher down or help her. (María [pseudonym], field note 1)

But this reflective process requires another element, which occurs in most students but not necessarily in all: the establishment of personal relationships with the “others,” represented mainly by children and adolescents who come from very different community environments, than those of the students. The emergence of affections and empathy favor the adoption of new perspectives that allow the social environment of the activity to be interpreted from a different point of view than that of the hegemonic culture and social classes to which most of the students belong. In the next field note from María’s fifth visit, we can see how she starts connecting with the children’s reality and using the university classes theoretical tools to do so:

Antonio, one of my new students, ended the activity before his classmates and sat next to me to tell me how he felt (…) “Teacher, did you know that even though I’m an entrevelao [mix of Roma and non-Roma] I consider myself Roma? You see, my father is Roma, but my mother isn’t. Here the Roma call me entrevelao, but since I grew up with the Roma in Las Vegas (they’re my father’s cousins) I’m now Roma.” So, I asked, “Why would you like them to treat you like a Roma?” And he said, “Oh, teacher, because the non-Roma mess with the Roma and look down on us. Roma blood is better.”

Many of the parents told me, in an interaction I had while waiting for a colleague, that they had to feed their children while working with their pathetic salaries and that many wouldn’t accept it. When I decided to ask them why they thought that happened they all had the same answer: “because we’re the Roma from the 3000Footnote 4 and they don’t trust us.”

Unfortunately, this ethnocentrism that anthropology teaches us about still exists today. We still find this tendency to consider our culture superior and to judge others, and it’s a fact that this should no longer exist given the major advances in the situation of the Roma. (María, field note 5)

This relational and affective immersion offers important tools to overcome the dissonance of the moment of entering the activity through the experience of a new perspective. It allows for many students a cognitive change, in ways of knowing and explaining reality.

Finally, this process of “real learning” in which the relational and affective converge with the strictly cognitive culminates in the “assumption of agency,” that is, the adoption of goal-oriented commitments, the transition from peripheral participation to a central participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) of involvement in the progress of the activity and in the spiral of its design, implementation, and evaluation. The learning subject is thus transformed.

Nina’s field note (transcribed in the vignette) shows the culmination of this process. She went through the stage of dissonance that she tried to address from her role as “observing college student.” The establishment of relationships with the “others” (which are evidenced in these field notes) allowed her to understand reality in new ways but, above all, led her to adopt commitments, with each of the children with whom she entered into interaction, as with the goals of the activity.

Discussion

In our chapter we have followed the development of two projects, La Casa de Shere Rom (Barcelona) and La Clase Mágica (Seville), as two Spanish iterations of the University-Community Links (UC Links) vision of community-engaged research. (See https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/ for more information about UC Links programs and the global UC Links network.) The researchers involved in these two projects (the chapter authors are part of a larger team) have shared reflections, tools, and strategies after identifying some commonalities in the main population we work with (Roma children) as well as the focus on undergraduate learning processes, as part of the whole learning system that all our network projects generate.

The history of our two projects, as a living system in which university students and teachers, researchers, school teachers, Roma community leaders, members and children have interacted and shared over more than 25 years, has led us to insights into the complexity and transformative power of these learning settings. They have fostered transformation in all participants (researchers, students, children, etc.) (Underwood et al., 2021). In this chapter we have focused on the transformation and learning processes experienced by undergraduate students as part of a whole.

We have followed the learning processes of our undergraduate students over time, through their own reflective writing in their field notes (García-Romero, et al. 2018). To do this, we have used concepts developed in the tradition of “Transformative Learning” as internal psychological processes (Lalueza & Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2020). However, for us the roots of these learning processes do not lie internally, in students’ cognitive and emotional processes, but in the features that the projects have developed as “hybrid contexts of activity.” “Hybrid contexts of activity” (Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2021) contain goals, artifacts, motives, and subjects that originally develop in at least two differentiated activity settings (university and formal schooling). This gives them a number of potentialities for change, which we have tried to reveal in our chapter. Firstly, through the voices of the students, which show how they are moving toward more nuanced and richer perceptions of the “cultural other” and their own values, transforming their own ways of being in the world. Nina’s and Maria’s testimonies show how their perceptions and attitudes have changed as a result of their participation in La Casa de Shere Rom and La Clase Mágica Sevilla. Secondly, through the narrative of the history of our project, where we show how the systems are living entities and long-term communities of practice, where transformation takes place in different directions and in all participants, moving away from traditional monological and patronizing concepts of socio-educational intervention.

We could conclude that the hybridity of our projects, which we tentatively conceptualize as “hybrid contexts of activity,” could be the main dimension that helps these transitions, these transformations, and learning processes in different directions to happen. The hybridity of our projects is the result of a low-level of institutionalization, in such a way that roles and tasks have to be constantly negotiated, offering more possibilities for creation and learning for all participants. This hybridity generates the need to create new (not tied to the “original” institutionalized university and formal school settings) shared meanings among the participants, what has been called a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008). All participants need to explore and find their agency in their own way. Participation, face-to-face interaction, and empathy with “the other,” in a context where decontextualized social categories become meaningless, are crucial elements for the emergence of transformative processes in all the different learners involved in our projects.