In December 1996, the UC Links network had only been in existence for about six months. Charles Underwood (then UC Links Executive Director) and Lora Taub (then Assistant Director) had just returned from the first-round of visits to UC Links programs across California. Charles sent a field note via email to the newly developed UC Links listserv that connected these programs. Describing what they had seen, Charles wrote:

UC Links is a living, growing web of activity. We want to share with all of you our sense, here at the year’s end, of the bigger statewide picture—both the variety and the similarities emerging across the statewide UC Links network.

The variety was evident in the range of activities undertaken by programs Charles and Lora visited. In Santa Cruz, a computer virus had temporarily disabled all of the computers so the kids and university undergraduates were busy playing board games. In San Francisco, high school students had developed their own computer-based activities and initiated a student-run publication that would be turned into a website. Charles noted that in Riverside, “the computers are assembled in ‘pods,’ facing each other, which really seemed to encourage interaction among small groups of children and undergraduates.” The Berkeley program focused on engaging young children and undergraduates in math games and activities which they would progress through developmentally. At the Fresno program, the children had skillfully put together a PowerPoint presentation, “taking photos of children, parents, teachers, and others… and then demonstrating how to convert them almost instantly to video display.”

Charles and Lora also communicated key similarities across programs in their email to the UC Links network. Programs were adapting the UC Links model to suit the needs of each community and young people were producing their own artifacts, using both digital and hands-on tools, including “newsletters, stories, journals, web pages, things to take home to share with their families.” Charles noted that as he and Lora observed the children and undergraduates interacting together, and the local community, school, and university partners meeting and planning together, they could “see first hand the kinds of relationship and spirit of cooperation on which sustainable, mutually beneficial collaborations are built.”

Looking ahead to the future for UC Links and opportunities for further connection and learning, Charles wrote:

Everywhere teams are talking about field notes. This seems like a great subject for collective discussion—there’s a variety of approaches throughout the system that might be usefully shared, including readings, templates, focused assignments, and so on. We’ll be contacting you in the next couple of days about the statewide UC Links mini-conference… We hope to have open discussion of a variety of issues, plus perhaps some small group sessions where folks from different sites can focus on issues of special relevance to themselves. (Underwood, email communication, December 17, 1996)

Introduction

The University-Community Links (UC Links) network is an example of university-community engagement that has taken root, grown, thrived, and adapted to ever changing conditions for almost 30 years (For more information visit https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/). In recent work, co-authors Charles Underwood and Mara Welsh Mahmood, working with UC Links co-founder Olga Vásquez, have drawn on ethnographic and historical data to document and compare university-community engagement across a globally distributed network of programs dedicated to the social and educational development of young people (Underwood et al., 2021). In this work, we applied a cultural historical lens to exploring the UC Links network and its programs and offer the framework of a sociotechnical activity system (primary work systems or UC Links program sites, whole organization systems or the UC Links network, and macrosocial systems or the broader social context) to situate and provide deeper context for and understanding of its work.

This chapter builds on the work of Underwood et al. (2021) and applies the framework of the sociotechnical activity system to further examine the UC Links network and how it has both responded to and been transformed by two definitive historical moments: the elimination of affirmative action at the University of California and across the state, and the COVID-19 pandemic. We begin by describing the conceptual framework for collaborative activity on which UC Links as a sociotechnical activity system is based. (See Underwood et al., 2021 for a comprehensive description.) We then apply that framework to understand the establishment of the UC Links network as the tools and practices that evolved over more than 25 years. We next use the sociotechnical activity system framework to understand how the UC Links network transformed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to adapt and transform itself in response to ongoing challenges.

As the vignette at the beginning of the chapter illustrates, since its beginnings a major objective of UC Links has been to extend access to digital technologies in ways that encourage and improve the academic preparation of young people in historically marginalized communities. Another explicit goal of UC Links, also highlighted in the opening vignette, has been to establish an extensive community of learners—a virtual network of scholars and practitioners focused on the productive educational uses of digital technologies. This chapter examines the emergence of this learning community and the local programs it operates, especially in its varied response over the years to such macrosocial issues as the rapid evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the recent worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

UC Links Conceptual Framework

We view University-Community Links (UC Links) from a Vygotskian perspective, as an example of distributed cognition in cultural historical context. Vygotsky (1978) suggested that human cognition and action are shaped in sociocultural activity, within the historical circumstances in which that activity takes place. This view posits that human thought and work take place in the context of coordinated systems of related tasks and activities. An after-school program represents a coordinated system of related tasks and activities. However, this activity is not locally independent, operating solely on its own; instead, sociocultural activity takes place within a broader context of historically developed structures that carry implications and have consequences for its immediate local work.

In their extensive studies of the primary (localized) activity system of the Fifth Dimension program, Cole and his colleagues (Cole, 1996; Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006; Vásquez, 2003) examined after-school youth programs as activity systems in which the site-based development of activities using mediational tools—for example, computer games, new digital media, and a variety of other hands-on materials—came to represent cultural systems that framed the collaborative engagement of older and younger peers. These activity systems created multiple opportunities for them to enact the zone of proximal development (ZPD), in which individuals together accomplished tasks collaboratively that they could not have completed individually (Vygotsky, 1978; Cole, 1996; Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006; Vásquez, 2003). This co-construction of the cultural framework for cumulative zones of proximal development, linking novice and expert peers in constellations of informal collaborative tasks, constitutes what Cole has called a “fifth dimension” of human cognitive experience: the dimension in which individual and small-group learning, in the context of activity systems, becomes culturally mediated and institutionally sustained over time.

UC Links eventually grew out of this theoretical and practical work as a means to institutionalize this kind of activity not merely as a program or a set of individual programs but as a long-term strategy for engaging universities and communities in the collaborative development of sustainable after-school programming for historically marginalized young people. UC Links was established in response to the 1996 elimination of affirmative action in California institutions, including the University of California, as one strategy for promoting student diversity at the University by improving the academic preparedness for higher learning among California’s minoritized students. The university and community people involved in running local programs also constitute a virtual network of communicating partners working to maintain local and cross-site collaboration and coherence both within and among the programs. The emergence of UC Links is, in this sense, a study in distributed cognition. Viewing UC Links from this perspective enables us to expand our understanding of its ongoing development as a sociocultural process of collaborative learning among culturally and institutionally diverse and geographically dispersed communities of practice. Because the use of newly emerging technologies has been a key element in the development both of UC Links site activities and of the collaborative work of its partners across sites, we have come to view UC Links as a sociotechnical activity system.

UC Links as a Sociotechnical Activity System

A sociotechnical system is an organizational system whose interrelated activities constitute a functional whole integrating the social and technical systems of activity—that is, the interplay among the people engaged in the collective work system and among the technical resources on which those people potentially draw (Trist & Bamforth, 1951; Trist & Murray, 1993) are intricately linked for their joint optimization (Trist, 1981; Fox, 1995). While first envisioned as a theoretical tool for analyzing and optimizing work systems, the concept of the sociotechnical system has broader implications for the organization of activity, as well as for program impact and sustainability, in educational domains (Underwood et al., 2021).

Sociotechnical systems function at three interconnected levels: primary work systems, whole organization systems, and macrosocial systems (Trist, 1981). Primary work systems are relatively small localized face-to-face work units in which people collaboratively develop and implement activities for specific purposes. Whole organizational systems are broader collectivities of people who work collaboratively across interconnected individual primary work systems, coordinating their own localized efforts with others outside their immediate range of activity, in pursuit of complementary goals and objectives that are shared across the whole organization. Macrosocial systems encompass even broader sociopolitical domains, including social agencies and institutions across multiple sectors of productive activity that shape, direct, and constrain or enhance the work of both the whole organization and its primary work systems (Trist, 1981). For the UC Links network, each local program site constitutes a primary work system; the UC Links network of program sites in geographically dispersed locations represents the whole organization system; and the broader communities, school districts, state, and national sociopolitical contexts together represent the macrosocial system in which both localized site activity and distributed network activity take place.

While UC Links may be understood as a sociotechnical system, it is at its heart an activity system—that is, an organized set of activities in which participants engage. The link between sociotechnical systems theory and activity theory is a close fit, although it is not always recognized or accepted as such. Sociotechnical systems theory sees human experience as the functional organization of the human use of tools (Trist, 1981). Activity theory approaches human experience as socially and culturally shaped or mediated by the human use of tools and sign systems (Cole, 1996; Nardi, 1996). These approaches are compellingly complementary in that they integrate our understanding of social structures and cognitive processes. By bringing them together theoretically in the conceptual framework of the sociotechnical activity system, we can view how individual human development and cognition take place not simply as an internal psychological process, but in a broader, multidimensional social context—that is, in the context of sociocultural activities in which human beings, using the tools at hand, negotiate and pursue shared goals (Vygotsky, 1978).

The chapters that follow focus on the primary work system (the local sites or settings where program activities take place) as a plane of activity. In this chapter, however, we attempt to understand the multidimensional character of UC Links activity, by focusing our lens more broadly on the whole organizational system (the network of program sites and the interaction of persons across sites) and the macrosocial system (individuals’ and groups’ interactions and encounters with large societal circumstances and arrangements that have a constraining or supportive impact on their individual or group activity, both locally and as a network). This chapter, then, examines the UC Links network as an organizational system and the larger macrosocial context as the units of analysis to understand how the network operates to support primary systems (individual programs/local program sites), how it has responded through expansive learning (Engeström, 2008, 2016) to the evolving macrosocial context and transformed over time, and how these transformations have in turn made an impact on persistent macrosocial issues facing the organization (e.g., creating a new alternative process for ensuring representation, especially access to higher education). To understand both the beginnings of the UC Links network and how it has evolved and transformed in response to the evolving macrosocial context, we examine the macrosocial context and the organizational system in two definitive historical moments: we briefly note the elimination of affirmative action at the University of California and across the state as a defining moment in UC Links’ beginnings, and then we discuss more thoroughly the historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic and UC Links’ response to it. The collective response through the UC Links network “brought to life Vygotsky’s concept of learning through ‘lived experience,’ or perezhivanie” (Underwood et al., 2021, p. 252). Examining this “world perezhivanie,” as described by longtime UC Links partner and contributing author José Luis Lalueza and his colleagues (Iglesias Vidal et al., 2020; also see Chap. 13 in this volume), thus provides an opportunity for expansive global learning (Engeström, 2016; Engeström & Sannino, 2020).

Program Context: The UC Links Network

In order to understand the UC Links network as a whole organizational system as well as how it has responded to and been transformed by definitive historical moments, we must first understand the macrosocial context in which the emergence of UC Links was situated.

Macrosocial Context

As noted in the introduction, UC Links emerged first in California as a networked, systemwide response to institutionalized racism. In 1996, the University of California Board of Regents eliminated affirmative action, ending the consideration of race in UC admissions. California voters soon followed by passing Proposition 209, which eliminated affirmative action practices in any state public institution. Two years later, in 1998, California voters passed Proposition 227, which effectively banned bilingual education across the state.

At the same time, the mid-late 1990s saw the rise of “Edutainment,” educational software designed to both educate and entertain (e.g., Carmen San Diego, Math Blasters, The Magic School Bus), the Internet, rapid technology growth, as well as recognition of the deepening “digital divide.” During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the evolution and transformation of information and communication technologies were in a rapid state of flux, transforming the way we all communicate and interact through them. This evolution has brought not only new opportunities to the education field (e.g., innovative ways of teaching and learning, expanding possibilities to design learning activities) but also new challenges, especially related to educational equity, differential technology access, and the digital divide (Cole, 1996; Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006; Parker, 2008; Underwood & Parker, 2011; Underwood et al., 2000; Underwood et al., 2003; Underwood et al., 2021; Vásquez, 2003).

Importantly, UC Links programs built on the recommendations of the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) Black Student Eligibility and Latino Student Eligibility Task Forces (Duster et al., 1992; Latino Eligibility Task Force, 1993) to support the social and academic development of students at the early stages of schooling (Kindergarten through eighth grade) so that students would be prepared for higher learning, university eligibility, and ultimately higher education. For UC Links, this also meant providing young people from historically marginalized communities access to the important tools and resources that are necessary to be engaged and successful in school and prepared for a pathway to higher education. Addressing root issues that lead to differential acceptance into higher education and expanding access to digital technologies for historically marginalized youth was from the beginning one of the goals of the network. The software created during this time was mostly text-based and the use of multimedia content (images, sounds, and videos), while existent, was not widely available. Additionally, software availability and access were not as widespread as they have become: usually, software was acquired via Floppy Disks or CD-ROMS and was installed in a single device (e.g., desktop computer), and the cross-platform capability was a limitation since every Operative System (mostly Mac or PC/Windows) required purchase of a specific copy of the Software—for example, Microsoft Office for word processing, spreadsheets, and digital presentations (Underwood et al., 2021).

Given that most of the UC Links sites were (and still are) in community-based organizations and/or schools located in historically marginalized communities, the lack of access and lack of funds to acquire technology hardware and services were endemic, due to institutional racism, including the fact that property taxes in California support local schools, with the result that impoverished and otherwise marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by limited funding for schools. For example, in 1996 when UC Links programs were developing across California, it was typical at this time for a UC Links partner school to have at most a handful of computers (if any) located in the school library and maybe one computer per classroom (often solely for the teacher’s use). Community-based organizations often did not have computers at all. Most of the technological devices and hardware that programs had access to were the result of donations by private contributors—which often donated outdated equipment as they renewed their technological infrastructures—or the result of purchases provided by high-placed administrative staff who prioritized affordability over quality, with the result that after-school programs faced severe limitations in their efforts to fully explore the affordances and possibilities that new technologies could provide to enhance participants’ learning experience and engagement. Annual funding from UCOP was critical to providing the technological and educational infrastructure that would enable UC Links partnerships with local community organizations and schools to be successful in securing access to computers, software, program activities, and hands-on materials that made after-school activities possible (Underwood et al., 2021).

UC Links community and university partners focused their attention on providing minoritized young people access to these resources and on developing learning activities that made innovative use of these emerging digital resources by drawing on the experience of the Fifth Dimension and La Clase Mágica program models, as well as those of the Distributed Literacy Consortium, which brought together similar programs around the world (Cole & Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006). The Distributed Literacy Consortium (described in the Introduction to this volume and in more detail in Underwood et al., 2021) provided an important model for how similar programs engaging university and community partners could work and learn with and from each other. This networked approach was critical in the early years of UC Links as programs were working to develop connections with community partners, co-design activities that drew on community resources and knowledge, and institutionalize these programs across UC campuses. Through this emergent and collective struggle, the UC Links network grew beyond localized programs working in isolation; they became a community of learners working together across geographical boundaries toward a shared future. This collective initial success led UC President Atkinson to make UC Links a permanent item in the University’s budget in 1998, guaranteeing sustained institutional support such that it came to be recognized as an exemplary model among the University’s Student Academic Preparation and Educational Partnerships (SAPEP) programs.

The Organizational System

Local UC Links programs, such as those described in the many chapters of this volume, constitute the primary work system of a sociotechnical activity system. This primary work system includes all of the diverse, local, on the ground settings where undergraduates and young people engage in informal learning activities focused on literacy, digital literacy, and critical thinking (Cronmiller, 2011; Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez, 2016; Hull, 2003; Hull & Katz, 2006; Orellana, 2015; Stone & Gutiérrez, 2007; Underwood et al., 2021). As an organizational system, the UC Links network connects and coordinates all of these primary work systems, including the university and community partners that work collaboratively to co-design, develop, implement, and sustain the local programs. Partners include staff and leaders from schools and community-based and nongovernmental organizations and university faculty, staff, and leaders. UC Links as an organizational system helps to connect local programs to a broader community of similar programs and thereby strengthen and sustain programs locally, while institutionalizing university-community engagement more broadly as a strategy for addressing structural racism and promoting increased diversity in higher education.

As of this writing in 2024, UC Links has programs throughout California and the United States in North America and in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1
A world map presents the global network. The U C links include the United States, Canada, Mexico, Kenya, South America, and others.

The UC Links global network

Full size image

In 2022–2023 in California UC Links programs alone, 21 faculty at six University of California and four California State University campuses partnered with 143 schools and five community-based organizations to engage more than 4075 young people and approximately 813 undergraduate and graduate students. For more details on UC Links programs and locations, please visit the Programs page on the UC Links website: https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/programs.

An important structure that helps to sustain the organizational system of the UC Links network is the UC Links Office, located at the UC Berkeley School of Education. Since the inception of UC Links in 1996, UC faculty have recognized the importance of having a central office to coordinate and advocate for programs as well as oversee important administrative duties and annual reporting to UCOP. Also established in 1996, the UC Links Office has supported and connected the primary work systems of local programs using a range of available digital and analog, face-to-face tools.

In its beginnings, communications between the UC Links Office and the UC Links community depended on quite limited and relatively slow capabilities (Underwood et al., 2021), including phone, email, and also visits to the programs throughout California. The UC Links Office created an email listserv that included key players from participating programs throughout the UC Links network and posted written field notes, like the one at the opening of the chapter, describing programs and program context in great detail as a way to lend support to newly developing programs and share localized knowledge, experience, and program advances across the distributed network. UC Links partners also used the UC Links listserv to share ideas about pedagogical activities and to discuss challenges that various sites faced both locally and across sites. Additionally, the UC Links Office held phone conferences, small face-to-face regional conferences focused on key topical issues, and an annual in-person UC Links conference.

Interestingly, during the early years of the network, UC Links did not initially find successive innovations in distance communication and collaboration—for example, blogs and videoconferencing tools such as Skype—to be broadly useful across the network, in part because key participants at various sites at that time had unequal access to and familiarity with those emerging tools. In the late 1990s, computers in UC Links programs were rarely even connected to the Internet and videoconferencing required the use of specially equipped media studios on university campuses. Glynda Hull’s UC Links program (UC Berkeley, Chap. 5) has always worked at the cutting edge of emergent digital technologies and in 2000 coordinated with Michael Cole’s UC Links program (UC San Diego) to connect the two undergraduate courses through shared readings and live discussions via videoconferencing. In practice, this required the course instructors to ensure the courses met at the same time and that there was access to the one media room on each University campus that had video conferencing capabilities (which often meant a dimly lit room with one stationary camera and microphone and a sometimes laggy Internet connection). On the days the UC Berkeley and UC San Diego classes were videoconferencing, all of the undergraduates had to go to their respective campuses’ basement media studio where, despite numerous technical glitches and interruptions, they nonetheless found themselves transported into a transformative space where they engaged in dialogue with peers who were having comparable experiences connecting theory and practice at their sites, 500 miles away. Clearly, videoconferencing capabilities have evolved dramatically since 2000, but even technologies like Skype had limited use given inadequate access to or familiarity with the tools, and because so few people could be easily involved within the Skype focal range (cf. Underwood et al., 2021, and Underwood & Parker, 2011, for more detailed accounts of UC Links’ early digital history). For cross-site meetings with larger numbers of participants, either face-to-face meetings or older technologies like telephone conferencing simply worked better—that is, until the onset of the pandemic.

Key Ideas: Pandemic as a Portal to Transformation

Viewing UC Links as a sociotechnical activity system enables us to observe critically both the opportunities and the constraints that programs (primary work systems) face in responding and adapting to the evolving macrosocial context. The rapid development of new digital technologies as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting amplified engagement with emergent digital technologies informed and continues to inform and transform the UC Links network broader ecology of university-community collaborations. In practice, throughout its earlier stages of development, UC Links’ use of new digital media developed most intensely within the primary work system of the local program site. There, university faculty and graduate and undergraduate students, key community representatives, and, in some cases, teachers, collaboratively developed learning activities using these digital technologies. For example, various sites incorporated the activity of digital storytelling, using scanned photographs and other images along with music and voice recordings in distinctive ways to tell stories. Glynda Hull (UC Berkeley) was an early adopter of this activity and incorporated digital storytelling within both the UC Links undergraduate course, allowing undergraduates to explore this medium, and the after-school program, where young people also told their stories digitally as purposeful acts of self-placement in the larger world around them (Hull, 2003; Hull & Katz, 2006). Gradually, other programs around the UC Links network also began adopting and adapting digital storytelling, focusing the activity on individual and family narratives, while other programs have focused on creating community narratives or oral histories, including the creation of formal presentations, such as community mapping projects that communicated either among themselves or to local public officials questions of pressing concern to the community in which the program operated (Underwood et al., 2021). Over the years, Glynda Hull’s program remained at the cutting edge of exploring emerging digital technologies, creating activities that incorporated Virtual Reality, Robotics and others (Hull et al., 2021; see Chap. 5). Similarly, other UC Links programs around the network today incorporate maker activities (Chap. 9), 3D printing, and the creation of virtual worlds by appropriating and reimagining video games (Cortez et al., 2022; Rivero & Gutiérrez, 2019).

These emergent technologies have enabled UC Links partners both to carry out local program activities and to share ideas and experiences with colleagues using similar digital activities at other sites around the world. Across the network, the technologies have also helped to facilitate a shared understanding of effective learning activities for young people from diverse backgrounds and communities and to the sense of belonging to an ongoing distributed community of learning and practice or organizational system. It is often assumed that educational programs make quick and productive use of new technologies. However, the achievement of a distributed learning community using cutting-edge technologies across programs has consistently proven to be a challenging task. For the organizational system of UC Links activity, the opportunities and challenges presented by the emergence of new technologies became especially heightened in our awareness while addressing a key macro social issue: the COVID-19 pandemic.

The shock of the COVID-19 pandemic represented both a potentially devastating challenge and an extraordinary opportunity. During this time, when around the globe we were forced to stay home and shelter in place and schools, after-school programs, and university courses moved online, the use of new digital media and the envisioning of new uses of both emerging and existing technologies became part and parcel of UC Links activity, both in and across programs. Arundhati Roy (2020) wrote about the pandemic as a portal—as a gateway from one world to the next. UC Links programs and the network as an organizational system took up this challenge of reimagining as a response to the macrosocial context thrust upon us by the effects of COVID-19. Similarly, longtime UC Links faculty Kris Gutiérrez (2008) wrote about the co-creation of a “third space”—a space that disrupts traditional hierarchies and allows for reimagining, and the pandemic provided the opportunity to rethink and reimagine activities and practices to better engage schools, communities, young people, and university partners throughout the state and the world. The encounter between the “third space” represented by UC Links program activity and the worldwide crisis represented by the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the collective work of UC Links as digital media quickly became not simply a preferred but more conclusively an indispensable set of tools for collaborative learning, both within and across UC Links sites.

In the process, above and beyond the primary work systems of local UC Links sites, the organizational system of UC Links became increasingly visible as a crucial plane of collective activity. The isolation created by the pandemic necessitated the development of innovative new structures and supports to ensure ongoing collaboration within and across the UC Links network and the effective and rapid dissemination of knowledge and best practices to university and community partners. While in the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2019–March 2020), the UC Links Office connected with university and community partners from individual UC Links programs, we did not host a single virtual event or network-wide meeting via Zoom. Between April 2020 and April 2021, there were 24 network-wide virtual events, including the only completely virtual UC Links International Conference, an inaugural virtual Youth Summit, and the number of virtual events has continued to grow exponentially.

In June of 2020, the UC Links Office (which then consisted of co-authors Charles Underwood and Mara Welsh Mahmood) convened its first UC Links network-wide virtual event. The Virtual Roundtable was attended by community, school, and university partners across four countries and focused on three goals:

  1. 1.

    Discussing emerging strategies for jointly responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and to ongoing endemic racism and educational inequities.

  2. 2.

    Sharing tools and resources to support the students, children, families, and communities with whom we work.

  3. 3.

    Initiating a future-oriented discussion based on shared learnings and strategies.

This initial event generated 13 pages of notes, almost half of which were resources that UC Links partners shared with each other ranging from early research from UC San Diego documenting that face coverings were effective in reducing COVID-19 infections (Zhang et al., 2020) to a Spanish language tutorial for how to use Zoom on an iPad created by the Community Education Program Initiative (CEPI) program: ⋍Cómo Usar Zoom en su iPad? (Watch the video here: https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/chapter2). Anonymous survey feedback from the Virtual Roundtable event confirmed its usefulness. For example, one participant wrote: “This was such a positive experience. It helped me see that we are not alone and that we can all learn from each other as we navigate these unusual circumstances”. Feedback also provided direction for how future events might be structured to be even more effective, for example, “I think separating into different rooms to have discussions would be helpful and would allow everyone to share… Not sure if any folks would like to see a bilingual breakout discussion—maybe worth asking?”

When the school year started in Fall 2020, it was clear that school and after-school programs were not going to return to in-person meetings; the pandemic was raging and vaccines were not yet available. Upon Charles Underwood’s retirement in July 2020, Mara Welsh Mahmood became the new UC Links Executive Director and Karla Trujillo became the new UC Links Student Assistant (Chap. 12), thereby comprising the UC Links Office from July 2020–December 2021. With Charles’ continued consultation, Mara and Karla worked closely with university and community partners around the globe, embracing and leaning into the new virtual learning environment as a tool for reconnecting and creating community at this time of great isolation and for addressing critical problems of practice—redesigning and reimagining in-person program activities for a virtual environment. The UC Links Office kicked off the school year with virtual office hours focused on the following:

  1. 1.

    Creating an informal space to reconnect, share ideas, or just hang-out and listen

  2. 2.

    Collectively imagining new futures for virtual after-school programs

  3. 3.

    Identifying next steps necessary to develop and/or leverage supports for our collective work

Building on the feedback from the virtual meeting in June, September’s Virtual Office Hours utilized a mix of breakout rooms and large group discussions to focus on a range of topics generated by attendees, including the following:

  • Communicating and engaging with undergraduates

  • Providing social emotional supports for young people and their families

  • Addressing logistical challenges

  • Pursuing strategies for providing tech support for young people and their families

  • Pursuing strategies for adapting activities for outdoor settings

  • Understanding Google Classroom and creative ways to use it

These virtual convenings put university and community partners in regular direct conversation with each other. Prior to the pandemic, this direct communication between UC Links programs occurred less pervasively via email exchanges on the UC Links listserv, the annual in-person conference, or through email updates and field notes from the UC Links Office. The UC Links Office previously worked to thread “a web of understanding between diverse partners by performing communicative work” (Nocon et al., 2004, p. 368). These new virtual convenings enabled partners to interact more frequently and directly, thereby jointly weaving a web of shared knowledge and experience and strengthening the overall network. This collective web was crucial to navigating the ever-changing times of the pandemic, holding one another through the uncertainty, and providing the structure to connect and learn from and with each other.

One result of this direct interaction among UC Links programs was the development of cross-site collaborations. For example, the CEPI program in Whittier, California, which engaged Spanish-speaking adults, was able to expand existing programming to include members of the La Colonia de Eden Gardens community in San Diego, CA. Monthly activities included a book club as well as a dialogue with a local medical doctor related to COVID-19 and community health. La Colonia de Eden Gardens community partners developed online Zumba and weight training classes in Spanish and invited members of the CEPI program to attend (Underwood et al., 2021). The Youth Summit detailed in Chap. 10 and the collaborative production of this edited volume are other examples of ongoing cross-site collaborations that emerged over time and many discussions during monthly virtual office hours.

The rapid adoption, widespread use, and development of Zoom allowed university and community partners access to videoconferencing capabilities from laptops, desktops and mobile devices. Gone were the days of holding video conferences in basement media studios. The UC Links Office leveraged this emergent technology throughout the 2020–2021 academic year, at a time when all in-school and after-school activities remained online, to convene topic-based virtual roundtable events and monthly virtual office hours, and worked with UC Links partners to develop and support evolving activities to further connect and strengthen the network. For example, in early 2021 John Cano (co-author and co-editor)—then a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara working as the LEAFY Site-Coordinator (Chap. 10)—suggested that UC Links university and community partners might explore new technologies together in a fun and informal learning environment. In February 2021, John hosted the first UC Links App-y Hour and demonstrated how to use JamBoard and Padlet. After a brief demonstration, John answered questions and provided time for participants to explore the technology and how it might be used in an undergraduate course or after-school program. This forum met a pressing need among university and community members to rapidly learn and integrate new technologies into UC Links undergraduate courses and after-school programs. It also provided intergenerational learning opportunities among the UC Links network: a graduate student developed App-y Hours and was the first to host it, followed by other graduate students, faculty members, as well as university undergraduates.

Additional activities that were developed to respond to the macrosocial context of the pandemic included the first UC Links State of the Network (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/chapter2), a digital message delivered in February 2021 by Mara and Karla, to provide an overview of both the local context (within California) and the broader challenges and opportunities (within the larger UC Links network) and the first ever virtual annual UC Links International Conference (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/uclinksconference2021) in March 2021. The conference was well attended and engaged partners both synchronously and asynchronously across five continents and multiple time zones and included virtual site visits, experiential learning activities, and “hands-on” work sessions. Today, the UC Links annual conference remains a hybrid activity—allowing both in-person and virtual participation. The UC Links Office continues to receive feedback from participants that the UC Links hybrid international conference is both inclusive and effective. For example, as one participant noted, “For some participants from outside the US, schedule and cost constraints can make it difficult to attend the conference. So I am glad that the hybrid conference allows me to stay connected with participants from around the world.” As another participant observed, “I was really impressed by how inclusive you made it for the online attendees, more so than in other conferences/activities where often they had a separate break out room for online participants.”

Like UC Links programs around the globe, the UC Links Office also had to leverage and create a range of digital tools to both engage and disseminate learnings, materials, and best practices among the wide range of UC Links participants. The UC Links Office developed a Resources (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/resources) page on the UC Links website (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/) to serve as an initial repository for digital materials from around the network. That page has evolved and expanded to the UC Links Digital Resource Garden (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/uclinks-digital-resource-garden), another example of cross-site and intergenerational activity. The UC Links Office also developed a UC Links Google Calendar (https://bit.ly/UCLinksCalendar) to share events and an enhanced social media presence including a UC Links YouTube channel (https://bit.ly/UCLinksYouTube), UC Links Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/UCLinks), and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/UC_Links/), providing more opportunities for UC Links participants to connect and learn with each other and the larger network. The UC Links Office continues to serve its role as a facilitator and convener of university and community partners throughout the UC Links network, supporting ongoing program development, cross-site collaboration, and expansive learning around the globe.

Discussion

The UC Links network emerged as a systemic strategy in response to institutional racism, more specifically the elimination of affirmative action. Since its beginnings, a major objective of UC Links has been to extend access to digital technologies and other educational resources in ways that encourage and improve the academic preparation of young people in historically marginalized communities. Another explicit goal of UC Links has been to establish an extensive community of learners—a virtual network of scholars, practitioners, community partners, and students whose programmatic and research activities are focused on the productive educational uses of digital technologies. For almost three decades, UC Links, as a sociotechnical activity system linking primary work systems (local programs) in an organizational system (the UC Links network), has continued to respond to and be transformed by the larger macrosocial context. UC links has strategically responded to the rapid evolution of new digital and multimedia technologies by working with schools and communities to incorporate them into innovative, collaborative learning activities at localized programs engaging historically marginalized young people. The UC Links Office has leveraged these technologies to connect and strengthen the network, thus transforming its role over time. The macrosocial context created by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the isolation of sheltering in place, the emergency transition to virtual activities, and widespread access to powerful video conferencing and other emergent digital technologies transformed the UC Links network, further distributing power among the already-distributed network while bringing it closer together.

Powerful technologies like Zoom coupled with the rapidly evolving activities like monthly virtual office hours put UC Links partners and programs in direct contact with each other, in the process changing their perspective on the very nature of their activity, both separately and together. This expansive learning process (Engeström, 2016) transformed the character of both the collective work within the primary work systems and the collaborative work among colleagues across programs. That is, the network transformed in a way that allowed more direct connection among any and all UC Links partners. Together, we were collectively weaving threads of expanded connection, understanding, knowledge, and practice that strengthened, nourished, and grew the UC Links network. Amazingly, the network actually expanded during the pandemic. Lisa Bugno from Italy (Chap. 16) had read about UC Links and was able to attend the Virtual International Conference to learn more about UC Links from her living room during the pandemic. Previously place-based, in-person UC Links programs were suddenly able to expand their geographic reach. For example, Math CEO developed an online high school program (Chap. 8), thereby expanding its range to engage students in other areas of California. The program, no longer bound by a physical location, extended an invitation to the UC Links programs throughout the network inviting high school students anywhere to attend Math CEO online.

Importantly, at this time of unprecedented uncertainty, university, school, and community colleagues throughout the network drew on the UC Links collective commitments (Chap. 1) and together came to understand how to learn through play and informal learning activities. We played with new technologies—to tinker, to make, and to innovate. During virtual office hours, the virtual and later hybrid International Conferences, and Youth Summits, we explored how to create dynamic connections and meaningful online activities and to share what we were learning in individual programs and across the network. We learned in intergenerational settings where the roles of expert and novice were flexible, depending on the activity. Graduate students developed and facilitated App-y Hour convenings, community members shared expertise related to appropriate and productive ways to access and engage community members, and school partners collaborated with university faculty and undergraduates to co-design learning environments and activities, both in and out-of-school. Collectively, university and community partners from around the globe created an expansive third space where partners reimagined not only local program activities but also the ways in which we connected and learned with and from each other as a network (Engeström, 2016; Gutiérrez, 2008; Underwood et al., 2021).

These learnings about how university and community partners can come together to build and sustain mutually beneficial collaborative activities—accumulated over three decades and intensified through a multiyear pandemic—have implications for the broader ecology of university-community collaborations. As a sociotechnical activity system, UC Links is continuing at both the program and the organizational levels to address macrosocial contingencies, such as the US Supreme Court ruling in June 2023 to eliminate affirmative action in higher education across the nation (Montague, 2023; Sangal et al., 2023). As you will read in the following chapters, programs around the globe are grappling with other pressing macrosocial issues as they apply to their immediate communities, such as social displacement (e.g., immigration, migration, and gentrification), linguistic bias and other forms of oppression, racism, and environmental injustice. At the same time, the organizational system of UC Links—the collective whole encompassing and integrating the international, intergenerational, multilingual, and interdisciplinary array of UC Links programs—continues to learn expansively from each other. Together, we address these challenges and view them as strategic opportunities for innovation in navigating whatever the future may have in store for us.