We sat around the long wooden table, computers open, each of us reading and writing at our own pace. The room was small and warm, the California sun beaming in through the windows, the quiet hum of students walking and talking outside providing a soundtrack to our work. Mara interrupted the silence with a casual, “So … what do you think of the edited volume?”

We looked at each other, each waiting for the other to speak first. This was our first day meeting with Mara, Marjorie, and John for this volume, and we were initially unsure how to jump into the work. We were brought in toward the end of the process, after almost 2 years of hard work that had been done by others; we were tasked with looking at the edited volume draft with fresh eyes, to provide feedback and insights. Where do we begin?

Introduction

As two doctoral students at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies, we have long been interested in how learning can be deployed in systemically oppressive settings to bring about change and justice for young people. It is this very interest that drove both of us to pursue our doctorates informed by our experiences as educators—Jackson’s in Omaha and Lebanon, and Micaela’s in New York City. The deeply embedded inequities within the education systems that we witnessed in these diverse contexts motivated us to spend the next few years of our lives asking: “Is something else possible?”

We were intrigued when we learned about the University-Community Links (UC Links) network and its breadth of interrelated programs, as they offer unique ways that communities, families, and schools, both K-12 and postsecondary, come together in the service of creating and building better worlds. (See https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/ for more information about UC Links programs and the global UC Links network.) In reading about and getting to know each program through this volume, we have learned about the singular ways that different communities have created these relationships and formulated social networks despite the fact that larger systems keep universities and their broader communities separated.

In this concluding chapter, we revisit some of the generative themes presented throughout the book, drawing connections and comparisons among them. We explore the chapter themes through the lenses of resistance and renewal, highlighting how rethinking learning in all its dimensions can help us reconceptualize education as a mediating tool for social change. We end with our thoughts on the greater significance of this work, what we can learn about the future of education and learning, and the inspiration we got as novice educational scholars deeply committed to the transformation of education.

This volume began with a discussion of seedlings—an account of the social history of the UC Links network and its various programs, each of which has taken root in an ecological context of its own, though all of them are deeply linked in their commitments to bridging some of the social divides so prominent in contemporary society. School life is generally separated from family life, and the gulf between universities and local communities is wide. These distances are especially stark in communities of color that are marginalized by ongoing processes of gentrification, systemic racism, and other forms of discrimination. Resisting the distance between town and gown, UC Links partners—higher education institutions, K-12 schools, community-based organizations, and other institutions—developed and germinated ideas that sprouted into projects of university-community connection. Writing about the interdependent nature of plant life, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) reminds us that it is precisely this network-based relationship that enables many plants to thrive as a larger group. Just as seedlings grow into networks of mutually dependent plants, so too have the UC Links programs grown into mutually dependent communities of practice and learning.

The UC Links network is premised on the idea of expanding educational opportunities for young people by leveraging the multiple talents of multiple generations across multiple community groups—faculty, graduate students, caregivers, community leaders, K-12 students, and undergraduates, all joining together. This shift, coming together and partnership creation, was also fueled by constant and persistent blows to educational equity; the attack on affirmative action across California served as a catalyst for the formation of the network, underpinning the urgency with which a new vision must be fed and nourished. What the founding of the network shows is the unique contribution of communities in solidarity with one another to combat policies of exclusion and disenfranchisement. Certainly, the programs described in this volume are no substitute for the kinds of systemic policy changes that are needed in order to remedy these historical processes of marginalization. But they are worthy of attention, as they provide concrete examples of what re-conceptualizing education can look like when deeply rooted in social justice, resistance, and renewal.

Our participation in this project came at a critical time for us as second-year PhD students at the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. As we begin to narrow the focus of our research and think through the scholarship we want to engage with, learning about the UC Links network has given us much to think about.

As we reflect on the programs within the network, thinking through what we can learn from them and ideas we have about new visions for the future of education, we feel it is important to first reflect on how we got here, and how, in some ways, being part of this project has been the natural extension of our two educational careers, each of us searching for change along the way. We were also inspired by the testimonials in this volume, by the voices of those who experienced these new approaches to learning, and reading their own words allowed us both to also take a step back and think through our journeys more broadly. We think it is useful, therefore, to situate ourselves in this volume, and show how our own journeys led us to this work.

Micaela’s Journey to Education

I found myself in the world of education somewhat accidentally. As an International Studies college student, I had mapped out a vision for my life working for the United Nations or perhaps going into the State Department and traveling the world. But then, as so often happens in life, sheer luck led me to my first education class, spring semester of my senior year. Scheduling and credit requirements took me to “History and Pedagogy of Alternative Education,” and my life changed. I remember reading through the first few chapters of Freire’s (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and Education and I saw my entire life’s vision, the one I had so carefully crafted around the “shoulds,” go down a road I never even knew existed. This laid the first brick of my path.

Yet, despite this realization, I still felt that strong craving to travel, and it was this motivation that led me to apply for an English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching position in South Korea. Once again, I found myself in an education environment somewhat accidentally. The 18 months I spent in South Korea solidified not only my love for education but my passion for working directly with students and young people. Second brick laid.

When I returned to the US, I had yet another chance encounter with education; I was back living with my father and needed a job, badly. An old friend from high school shared a post on Facebook about a preschool that was looking for teachers. I reached out, had an interview, and a couple of months later I found myself the assistant teacher to a class of 15 3- and 4-year-olds. Brick number three.

I spent four incredible years working as a preschool teacher at a Reggio Emilia early childhood center in Lower Manhattan. And it was in those years that I realized that those accidents, those chance encounters with education may have been my intuition, my subconscious leading me down the path closest to my heart. The alternative approach at the Reggio school led me to further investigate the idea of alternative education at Casa Sula, a school in Costa Rica loosely inspired by notions of unschooling and freedom-based learning. It was at Sula that I saw the bridging of alternative education theory and practice, and I experienced non-directive education that centers young people’s voices and respects their autonomy. And while I was really enjoying my time there, November 8, 2016 (the day that Donald Trump was elected as president in the United States) led me to yet another pivot; it was time for me to go back to school and apply some of my real-world experiences into learning about how to make education—and in my young, idealistic mind, the world—a better place. With more bricks laid, the road was taking shape.

I went to graduate school for International Education, where I examined the intersections between human rights, social justice, and education, specifically looking at the relationship between education and immigrant rights and where I began to ask myself some of the larger questions that remain present in my current path: Can, and should, education play a bigger role in shaping society? I carried this question with me as I stepped into my next role, working at a college access program for youth of color from low-income communities in New York City. This job allowed me to dig deep into the stark inequities plaguing the country’s largest—and most segregated—school system, and after 4 years I followed the road back into academia, where I currently find myself.

These experiences, along with my intersectional identity as a queer bilingual Latina, and my own journey as an immigrant student in New York, have led me to a life of searching for something new. The transformation of education is the umbrella within which I operate and it is what motivates me every day to continue to learn, investigate, and fight for a brighter future. And when the opportunity arose to join the UC Links edited volume team, I saw it as a way to continue investigating my burning question: is another way possible?

Jackson’s Journey to Education

I began my journey in education while I was still in high school, working with a refugee resettlement agency tutoring English to newly arrived refugee families in Omaha, Nebraska. When I began that work, I knew, sort of instantaneously, that I wanted to continue doing it for the rest of my life, in some form or another. During my undergraduate time at Harvard, I got involved in several teaching gigs, some of which were working in refugee communities and programs. I’d spent time in high school and college pushing away the idea of being a teacher, thinking I wanted to do something ‘outside the norm,’ that teaching was too obvious a choice for me. But it was after my first summer working in Lebanon as an Education Coordinator with an NGO providing English language classes to Palestinian refugee youth that something clicked into place. I stopped fighting the teaching urge, enrolled in a teacher education program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and began my career in earnest after graduation.

I taught for several years at a high school newcomer program in Omaha, Nebraska, where I learned what it meant to be gifted sacred time in the classroom with amazing young people seeking asylum or being resettled as refugees from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Burma, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria. My mind whirled those years—with ideas and questions and theories about language, identity, and the labels we give to students. And just as my mind whirled, so too did my heart, as I got further and further embedded and interconnected in the incredible lives of the students I worked with. I saw injustice after injustice—from ethnic cleansing campaigns, genocides, and wars that brought refugee students to my room, to ongoing struggles to make ends meet, to escape violence and discrimination, that led others to seek asylum. And the injustices were ongoing in the United States—students whose on-the-job injuries at meatpacking plants went untreated for fear of deportation, students whose families were either killed, absent, missing, or estranged, and students who faced abuse at the hands of loved ones upon migrating to this country. And as these things happened, I saw how ill-equipped our school system was to handle these problems. Our singular focus on a traditional version of education was woefully inadequate for these brilliant, bright souls.

After a few years, I transitioned into teaching social studies at another local high school, and it was soon after I started working there that I began to realize just how much I missed working in refugee education, in ESL in particular. I put the thought aside, but when the pandemic hit, I began radically rethinking what I wanted for my life. The trials and troubles students faced in the US education system, after enduring so much already, led me to refocus on those questions swirling around in my head during my early years of teaching: How can we rebuild curriculum in a way that is relevant, democratic, and of immediate use to young people? What would it mean to radically accept natural language use in ways that made ESL programming obsolete? How could we incorporate health, wellness, and love into a pedagogy whose ultimate goal was a critically conscious classroom that seeks justice just as much as it seeks ‘proficiency’? All the while, my continued experiences in Lebanon with Palestinians every summer further informed this need—a global need, to reconsider the possibilities education affords us.

With these goals in mind, I began a doctoral program in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA with a thirst for conversations that anchored me in this pursuit of justice, all the while exploring and celebrating the languaging and identity practices of refugee and asylum seeker youth in the United States. These are the experiences that have led me to where I am today, excited to take part in this edited volume and to learn from the programs in the UC Links network that are re-imagining what learning can look like—both through pedagogy and through community.

Reflections on Resistance in Theory and Practice

As is shown in our own pathways into education, we were interested in looking for new ways to think about learning. We both spent a lot of time searching for and thinking about models of transformative learning throughout our first year as PhD students. We have discovered theories and scholarship that have helped us to frame challenges within education and to dream of something new. And this project has kindled a particular academic spark, motivating us to pursue a more in-depth reflection on theories of resistance as they pertain both to the programs in this volume and to learning more broadly. We hope our brief meditation on resistance scholarship at the end of this volume is helpful for readers who want to take theory into practice, as has been done throughout the preceding chapters.

We see in the UC Links programs in this volume a unique contribution to how community-based initiatives and community-university partnerships in learning can be truly transformative. The introduction to this volume outlines how resistance is at the heart of each of the UC Links programs as they unite people from diverse backgrounds across diverse institutions in authentic and meaningful relationships based in learning. We view this process of resisting the expectation that learning be asocial and divorced from the heart as a form of renewal. Resistance creates unique opportunities for the renewal of communities and of learning, as the various parts of this volume reflect. At the same time, many scholars have theorized about what resistance means conceptually. Working on this project has led us to read further about resistance and to reflect on how it is used within these chapters in different ways. Our reflections on theory help situate the chapters of this volume in an important genealogy of intellectual thought about resistance, and to connect theory and practice. What follows is a brief exploration of some of the key ideas that have supported the resistance work of scholars and practitioners, along with our own thoughts about how the UC Links network fits within these concepts.

Resistance has become an increasingly popularized buzzword in the social sciences, and the field of education is no exception. Academic buzzwords are the product of the intellectual zeitgeist of a particular period of time, but they also shape and form further iterations of intellectual trends. Buzzwords also live outside of academia, in pop culture, in politics, and in the media. As Andrea Cornwall (2007) notes, “buzzwords get their ‘buzz’ from being in-words, words that define what is in vogue.” While her argument is tailored to the field of development studies, the ‘buzz’ of the word resistance amounts to much the same thing in the field of education. So, what’s in a buzzword? In particular, we wonder, why has resistance become re-popularized in contemporary literature? What led to it? And how does it connect more specifically to the programs discussed in this volume?

We find that resistance literature is neither new nor unique—scholars have written about various forms of working around or against the status quo for decades. We turn to the heyday of resistance theorizing, seeing in its roots particular pieces of resistance that we think can carry us into the future. Perhaps the most relevant resistance ‘turn’ in social science literature began as radical educators reformulated structural analyses of schools through neo-Marxist lenses in the 1970s (Giroux, 1983). Scholars like Bowles and Gintis (1976) considered schools to be institutions whose primary purposes were to produce the various labor needs of the capitalist market. Thus, the structure of schools corresponded to the labor market. While an explanation of the deeply political nature of schools was certainly needed, theorists such as Henry Giroux (1983) and Paul Willis (1983) made important critiques of this overly structural view of the educational system, which have important implications for how we think of resistance within the UC Links network.

Giroux challenged this overly structural view by asserting the importance of young people’s agency within school systems (Giroux, 1983). Theories of reproduction did not often engage with the transformational possibilities that are made manifest by the agentic power of individuals working together to make change. Sociocultural theories of learning and interaction, however, posited how individuals co-construct their social worlds through interaction and mutual meaning-making. We believe that this emphasis on individual agency is important, especially as it is articulated throughout these chapters; the power of people to make changes to systems through their everyday choices is considerable. We note, however, that some attention to individual agency does not take away communal power. Our aim is not to take up a Western focus on individualism. But the structural views on education forwarded in the past too often erase and render invisible local communities of individuals as powerful agents of change. We see individuals working together in community as powerful because of the relationality baked into these connections. We think that returning to the original threads of these theories of resistance can give us analytic clarity for understanding acts of resistance today.

Such a view on resistance is foundational to our understanding of how the UC Links programs have been able to accomplish what they have to date. Neoliberal systems of power and control that have shaped the cleavages between town and gown do not fully account for the full range of interactions that occur in communities, in the in-between spaces where people meet each other and form new partnerships. While the social distances between universities and communities persist, they are not merely reproduced without change, which is precisely the critique of overly deterministic reproduction theories that scholars like Giroux and Willis offer. This means that these distances, these relationships, can be changed. University-community partnerships have re-figured the connections between scholars, K-12 practitioners, young people, their caregivers, and communities as one way to begin to dismantle the hegemony inherent in those systems. In re-making and re-formulating what partnerships can look like, new bonds form, and resistance has been paired with renewal.

Bringing together the actions, beliefs, and commitments of individuals from multiple social groups creates a new group culture, which works to constitute its own identity outside of the influence of the dominant group (Giroux, 1983). Such community cultures are powerful agents of change. They are made more powerful by the strength of their common values and political commitments.

From our perspective as readers on this project, we were excited to see in the UC Links programs a commitment to equitable distribution of power across generations, to valuing language and its creative possibilities, and to bridging social gaps in ways that promote joy, play, and positive relationships. As Audre Lorde said, “Without community, there is no liberation” (Lorde, 1984, p. 2). Across the various program contexts, when people come together to form diverse partnerships, they create new forms of community that are only possible through a measure of trust, goodwill, and common belief in their power to make change.

The kinds of resistance we explored in theory are echoed in our very own practice. In the case of our own team working on this volume, we are each differently positioned within higher education—from full professors to program directors to graduate students. In most settings like this, such positioned identities result in hierarchical distributions of labor that maintain and uphold particular power dynamics. The kinds of resistance we explored in theory are echoed in our working process. Our editing process was rooted in getting to know one another, building relationships of care and respect that are not in keeping with typical hierarchies in academia. We worked as equals, sharing ideas, and variably taking up roles as experts. We engaged in a dialogic process of learning and meaning-making, iterating on one another’s ideas in a way that created further meaning-making propositions one after the other. In this sense, our work process embodied the kinds of relationships that resist norms of hierarchy, and in the work, we initiated a sense of renewal of what collaboration can look like. The programs outlined in the volume center collaboration and intergenerational learning as ways to transform education, and these processes were mirrored in our own experience working together. We were, therefore, able to witness theory in practice: how individuals use their agency to create new relationships based on an ethic of love within Western hierarchical institutions.

We return to the roots of resistance theory to center its key tenet of honoring youth agency. We argue that what makes resistance possible is not just agency, but the community relationships young people develop and enact in opposition to oppressive hierarchies. We argue further that love must be at the core of these relationships. hooks (2000) described how holding an ethic of love is essential in the fight against systems of domination which rely on the separation of people from each other—an ethic of love is a critical antidote. Living an ethic of love enables us to develop stronger bonds with each other, and such forms of community are the embodiment of this love. In essence, loving relationships can be a form of resistance in and of themselves. Our working process shows what is possible when groups of people from different positionalities embrace an ethic of trust, love, and play through collaborative, intergenerational efforts, just as the other chapters do.

It is clear in the writing of this volume that there is so much love throughout these programs. The roots of resistance theory remind us that young people are agentic individuals. We see the relationships and love that come out of this agency are also key ingredients to what makes resistance powerful. Relationships in the UC Links partnerships are forms of resistance because they resist the calls toward hierarchy and separation of people along class-based and racialized lines, which are inherent and necessary in the dominant systems of racial capitalism and coloniality of our time (Quijano, 2007; Robinson, 2000/1983)—but not in the systems we might imagine, and begin to bring into being. Relationships of love, of creative joy and change, lead us to renewal.

Future Thinking: Transformation through Resistance and Renewal

The power of this edited volume lies within the possibilities it presents for what learning can look like. Each chapter unveils what has been often hidden: Educational systems in the Western tradition have worked hard to hide from their purview the ways that people learn and live best—in communion with one another, in dialogue with one another, in playing with one another. Each program’s chapter exposes that which has most often been pushed to the margins, what has for so long been set apart from what has come to stand as the norm of technocratic, rugged individualism of Western school culture. This volume allows us to embrace the concept of re-imagination, and gives us permission—as university and community educators and scholars of all kinds—to more firmly and confidently step onto the solidity of what we have longed for: bringing into sharp focus a new vision for education. The programs in the network are concerned with the broader issues of oppression, dispossession, and disunity we have sketched, but they take up these concerns in ways that are appropriate for their local contexts. Thus, one of our main visions for the future of transformative education is to see partnerships built around issues that are meaningful at the local level, and which have global relevance as well.

Learning can be different from how it has generally been approached in Western education—as individualistic, as standardized, as disconnected from others, as valuing adults’ voices over young people’s. We embrace the idea that education systems can shift away from perpetuating social inequities and replicating societal hierarchies, as has been the case for decades in Western education, teaching, and learning. We can have classrooms and programs that center student voices like UCLA’s B-Club, if we can learn as teachers and administrators and educational planners to loosen control, trusting in the learning that happens in all places where people interact. We can center creativity, and multi-modal self-expression, as Berkeley Y-PLAN, English Media Club in Augsburg, and the San Francisco Bay Area Critical Digital Literacies programs demonstrated, if we re-vision our assessments and learning products along meaningful, relevant lines of thinking. We can elevate the value and importance of play, as in the La Mia Scuola è Differente initiative in Italy, if we trust pedagogically in the ability of play to produce important learnings. We can center the needs of the community and create a bridge between schools and their communities, as illustrated by Math CEO and Beta Lab Links, if we are proactive and creative in our partnerships, entering them with a sense of humility, openness, and mutuality, and if we attend to the local nature of social networks that are unique to each region. We can root education in social justice and equity, as they do in the Shere Rom Project in Barcelona and La Clase Mágica in Seville, as well as the program in Uruguay, if we continue to fight for the ideals of justice in politically embattled school districts. We can have culturally sustaining pedagogies and methodologies, as demonstrated by San José Y-PLAN, and we can conceptualize how we approach literacy education through the importance of language and culture like Corre la Voz in Santa Cruz and Community Based Literacies in Santa Barbara. We can make all subjects culturally responsive, like Nuestra Ciencia in San Luis Obispo. And we can center the importance of wellbeing, as seen in the Wellbeing Club in Uganda. All of this is made possible when trust is built between communities, coupled with strong and open lines of communication and the valuing of one another’s ideas, including and especially those of children and young people.

We can transform our approach to learning and education by resisting traditional, oppressive systems of the past and renewing our commitment and our efforts to create something new. The programs showcased in this volume demonstrate just some examples of what this renewal can look like. We live in a society that is grounded in binaries. We want ideas to be neatly packaged for us with clear-cut labels and categories, as a part of the long tradition of Western positivism that obsesses with classification and identification. But the programs of this volume have shown us the magic that emerges when we embrace the unfinished nature of pedagogies and accept a messy and spiraled way of being that is continuously in flux. The UC Links model of connecting universities and communities is just one way to bridge the divides between the multiple parts of our local communities, not the only way. We can take the lessons here and apply them in multiple other, creative ways to building and bridging partnerships of all kinds—between kids across towns, between adults and kids across nations, between worksites in the same city, between humans and our more-than-human relations, between ourselves and the lands and waters we live on and with.

Our hope for the future of education—and of our world—is to embrace these community-based alternatives of learning as possible roadmaps for something new. Practices of the past are not working to create equitable learning for all kids.

As we write this conclusion, the world around us feels tremendous pain. As you have read throughout the chapters of this book—from Uruguay to Italy to Uganda, UC Links participants are often impacted by interlinked systems of colonial oppression and violence and their ongoing legacies. And in the United States, many participants have migration stories that are linked to similar stories of displacement that are often less recognized by the general public in the West. The scars of colonial and imperial violence color the lives of many in our network, and they call us to think more deeply about what it means to be in relation with one another. Jackson’s own experiences with Palestinians in Lebanon, and the deep relationships they have there, are especially relevant in this moment. The ongoing genocide in Palestine has been devastating to so many. It is the strength of Jackson’s relationships that has made these events so deeply personal to them. At the same time, these relationships are also foundational for how we move forward—they let us reach out, send love, and hold each other amidst the horror. It is not lost on them that these relationships, forged despite vast physical and social distances, represent a similar form of resistance to the one we have been describing throughout this conclusion. Oppression is ongoing, and so too is the steadfastness of our solidarity. The events of the last months compel us to ask—what do we do in the face of such massive forces of oppression? How can we renew ourselves in our relationships and commitments to each other? Perhaps it is not enough, and yet, we take heart in our kinship, knowing that in times of sorrow and pain, we at least have each other.

As we finish this writing, we, Jackson and Micaela, reflect on what we want our futures to look like, and what we hope learning in relationships can look like in the service of a brighter future.

How can learning move forward?

We believe that process is one of continually trying to grow upward and outward, one step at a time.

We continuously commit and recommit to valuing play, love, and relationships, always asking if our practices are working to serve communities.

And when things seem broken, unjust, and beyond repair, as we’ve learned from these chapters, we commit to continuing to put one foot in front of the other, and always try new ways of doing things: new ways of relating to each other, new ways of communicating, new ways of organizing our way of life, new ways of talking to and about each other, new ways of teaching, and listening, and learning, and loving. We aspire to always return to the core commitments—as outlined in this volume— as we grow forward.

We commit to finding alternatives, never shying away from the awesome challenge of going back to the drawing board and seeing what we can come up with.

As we have seen through the chapters of this book, there is hope, beauty, and brilliance in the alternatives. These programs offer something new, something different, a different approach to learning than what has most conventionally and historically been done in Western schools, and through this commitment we see that there is potential, and there is hope. Of course, as seasoned educators we know this is not easy. There are no simple recipes or formulas to transform education, no easy-to-follow blueprints, and we do not claim to present one here. For us, this volume demonstrates the possibilities that can arise from trying alternatives. There are ideas germinating all around us. And by bringing forth the alternatives, by bringing them out from the margins to shine brightly under the sun, for all to see, and to share with one another, we are able to reimagine and move ahead with hope, passion, and excitement for what may lay ahead. This volume serves as a crucial reminder that through the many challenges that exist in the world, through the pain and darkness that is too often surrounding us, there are always communities of people working to bring the light forward. As bell hooks said, there are radical possibilities of resistance in marginality.

And so onward we go!

We take heart in the relationships we have, in the wisdom of young people, and in the community we’ve built. Together, we work to regenerate possibilities; we continue to hope, to try, and to play, to renew visions and forge new pathways for transformative education.