We’re several sessions into our big Fall 2019 project in the Corre la Voz (CLV) after-school program when we start seeing the changes really taking place in the community. Right now, it’s Proyecto Time—the last 50 minutes of Corre la Voz that everyone looks forward to. The class is now divided into two movie-making groups, clustered in desks in front of the white board, getting ready to develop their movie characters.

I’m observing the largest group, which is rambunctious, creative, and edgy. They have agreed to call their movie “Black Hood,” a story about kids at school who are mysteriously disappearing, but the grown-ups refuse to believe it. The “character” activity explodes into more plot development, and impromptu theater as the fifth-grade student who both came up with the title for the story and claimed the anti-heroic role (he is Black Hood) explains the backstory. The reason kids are disappearing is that Black Hood is kidnapping them; and he’s doing this to wreak revenge on the school because years ago he was first bullied there and then unjustly expelled.

Instead of continuing to explain, he demonstrates by flipping the hood of his sweatshirt way forward, pushing away from the table, and going outside to show how the camera shot will look when he is peering in the window. He has everyone’s rapt attention; the kids stand up and recommend different windows or angles, nodding and laughing, then turn back to work on their own characters. Who are they in this story? The Black Hood character-author comes back to check with his undergraduate mentor, who is madly taking notes. She also has some questions for him, which she’ll save for a later one-on-one.

One fourth-grader decides she wants to enact bullying by being a “VSCO Girl,” a term I have to google later. “Who has a Hydroflask?” she asks. (No one.) “Put down ‘Lots of scrunchies!’” she says, pointing to the “Props” list. Her mentor gently nudges the pencil in her direction. Voices are rising and falling, interrupting themselves and each other in their excitement. Oddly, it turns out that everyone so far is signing up for a bully role, which creates a lopsided effect in the cast. Will they be bullying each other? Where will this end up?

A student who has arrived recently from Mexico and speaks only Spanish is sitting slightly apart from the group, talking with his mentor. I come closer and learn that he has heard a translation of the plotline, and is very excited to participate in such a compelling story. He has claimed the role of Goku, Earth-defender (from Dragonball Z), and—gathering inspiration from the cards he has produced from his backpack—is now practicing “Goku’s Greatest Speech,” so he will be ready to organize the community when the time is right in the story: “Soy la esperanza del universo. Soy la respuesta a todos los seres vivos que claman por la paz…” (“I am the hope of the universe. I am the answer to all living things who cry out for peace…”).

Introduction: The Corre la Voz Activity System

As the opening vignette suggests, Latinx youth in the Corre la Voz Program (CLV) have processed some intense conditions. Like most kids, college students, and families of Mexican and Central American backgrounds living in the United States, the CLV participants living in Santa Cruz, California, are growing up or becoming professionals in circumstances that place them “against the winds” of global capitalism, as Gregorio Hernández Zamora puts it in Decolonizing Literacy (2010).

From its beginning in 2009 to the present, the aims, content, and general strategies of this program have remained very consistent. The aims are to improve immigrant Latinx community members’ opportunities to thrive and pursue their full potential, both on campus and off; and to develop replicable pedagogies that educational activists can use when working with any communities or groups who find themselves displaced or in adverse circumstances. The program has revolved around an after-school workshop in multimodal, dual-language arts, where undergraduate and middle-grade student cohorts work with faculty to build transformative learning communities. The strategies and techniques work through culturally relevant, participatory pedagogies that build collective awareness and shared context, and draw out each person’s contributions—their ideas, background, and visions.

This chapter focuses on an integrated set of program designs and techniques that evolved through ten continuous years: Fall 2009 through Winter 2020. In Spring 2020, COVID-19 and university budget cuts began reshaping the program. Yet the designs, techniques, and shared understanding of what the program did were so strong and effective that they were adaptable, even in much-reduced and stressful circumstances, and in varied contexts. Even today as the program faces greater economic challenges, the integrated pedagogies and community relationships developed in those years now constitute a solid “toolkit” or source of Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) that can continue to be developed in multiple ways.

The fundamental CLV strategy for shifting power in schooling is to use collective, activity-based language arts work that creates deliberate spaces, and then asks members of the community to fill those spaces through discussion and action: with their bodies; with their own cultural references and , and with new ideas and dreams. This is work that “puts culture and language in the middle” (See Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez et al., 1997). The program works to resocialize learning, and its strategies are collective in ways that help to balance the individualist culture of mainstream schooling in the United States. This collective logic and the techniques associated with it, for gathering and building community and linguistic wealth, and for working in group process, are essential for developing confidence and skills in culture and language—which need social context and interaction.

The inherently social, contextual, and uniquely lived nature of language and meaning-making (literacies) makes any language arts teaching-learning program both labor-intensive and charged with cultural power. In recent decades, it has been easier and less expensive for schools and universities to displace or routinize these areas of learning than to engage them, along with all the inequities and deep wells of meaning they represent. This mainstream trend works intersectionally to atomize and push out immigrant students, especially when their cultures and languages are minoritized, devalued, or seen as educational problems to be remedied. As has been amply demonstrated by educational researchers, these mainstream, modernist models too often work “subtractively” (Valenzuela, 1999) on the identities and holistic power of dual-language communities of color. Individualist benchmark learning in dominant culture and language, when used as the sole metric of achievement, frames students, communities, and the civilizations they come from as social problems in need of tutoring, instead of linguistically complex global citizens with diverse resources (Garcia & Wei, 2014; Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). CLV follows in the footsteps of all the community-based and critical literacy programs that have begun with the premise that we do not have to accept mainstream language arts and literacy approaches that tend to assimilate, subtract, rank, and exclude. Indeed, we have found that transformative language arts are also ideally suited to goals of social transformation: of creating diverse communities of belonging; of articulating submerged narratives and memories; and of serving as spaces for new, polyvocal proposals for change.

CLV created something that had not existed in local institutional or community space before: a continuous space (Fall to Spring but also enduring over years) dedicated to a culturally relevant, after-school mentoring program for Latinx students. Though small, the program has connected and lifted up the talents of the Latinx immigrant community at the university and in local schools. Just by bringing mentors and youth together in this way, CLV has been part of a rising generation of leaders of color, and a larger movement in the county to better articulate the importance of representation in all social institutions, but especially the schools. CLV’s collaboratively created curriculum and program designs for building regenerative communities of learning are an important contribution to that movement.

This chapter highlights a few of those CLV program structures and activity designs, in particular those that revolve around collective-participatory approaches to self-research for capacity building and power-sharing. These approaches draw on Latin American participatory action paradigms (e.g., Boal et al., 1979; Cammarota & Fine, 2007; Medina & Campano, 2006; Fals Borda, 1979; Freire, 1972; López Vigil, 2005; Montero & Varas Díaz, 2007; Stout & Love, 2019). Each of the programmatic techniques discussed in this chapter works to shift cultural power in learning in two ways: they gather and recognize community Funds of Knowledge as a platform, and then offer collective problem-solving tools to change social roles and power conditions.

These participatory techniques intentionally shape physical and social space, time, and activities to create community and transformative learning opportunities. For example, CLV’s Opening Council, which launches the program at the start of the school year, establishes the Contrato (Constitution) and also builds skills for restorative justice. CLV’s Daily Activity Structure works to create a shared community context by building relationships, confidence, and symbolic repertoire each day, and is a critical tool for developing an inclusive, self-regulating, transformative classroom. Dinámica activities are classic Latin American techniques for holistic, transformative learning, and are the pivot point in every CLV program day. While the complexity of CLV’s long-term project curricula (ensemble drama, documentary, movie-making) and their impact exceeds the scope of this chapter, we describe one group “photovoice” activity to illustrate how CLV projects gather community Funds of Knowledge and channel them into community power.

Woven through these examples are glimpses of the kind of work that undergraduate mentors do at CLV. What is not shown in this chapter is that these same collective and participatory strategies for shifting power are built into the undergraduate course at the University of California, Santa Cruz, that drives CLV. Similar to the Nuestra Ciencia program and course described in Chap. 7, the “Community Literacies” course at UC Santa Cruz uses collaborative processes to engage mentors’ critical thinking and investment in activity design in theory/praxis cycles. This participation simultaneously builds understanding, a sense of team purpose, and a sense of co-ownership of the classroom, which are essential to undergraduates’ reclamation of power and to their emergent leadership. The kinds of cultural power changes that undergraduates experience, and are expected to enact in the program require space, collective process, and peer support. In a very compressed time-frame (a ten-week quarter), with direct faculty mentoring and analytical course activities, they think and talk through their own self-understandings connected to schooling, culture, language, and power; and they also bring themselves into a new place, new roles, and potentially different futures than the ones they had imagined. In fact, undergraduates are at the crux of all past and potential transformations in this activity system. Ongoing program strategies are dependent on their empowered roles in the course, and this empowerment depends on active, participatory learning and teaching spaces at the university. More broadly, their critical formation in CLV has immediate potential to reshape their futures and the future of the communities they will impact as dual-language educational leaders (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1
A photo of 3 children who sit around a round table in front of a laptop. They watch a video on the laptop, with one of the children pointing a finger to the laptop screen. A rack with stationary items next to foldable tables is in the background.

CLV gathers and channels Community Cultural Wealth through multimodal creative projects. Hands-on pedagogies integrate collaborative discussion, cameras, computers, and other tools into a relationally-based classroom

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Program Context

Corre la Voz is located in Santa Cruz, a small, beautiful beach city on the central coast of California, renowned as the #1 least affordable rental market in the United States, which means metro Santa Cruz has the widest gap in the country between wages and housing costs. The direct and ripple effects of this burden have accrued disproportionately to Latinx immigrant families and children, who comprise 47% of the school district adjacent to UC Santa Cruz, and up to 70% of students in some schools. Teaching staff are almost all White. Corre la Voz was established in 2009, at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) in partnership with Santa Cruz City Schools, which continues to date. In 2020, as described briefly at the end of this chapter, our partnership formally expanded to a triad with Senderos Santa Cruz, a powerful, grassroots organization promoting cultural education, family involvement, and positive identity development, primarily through dance and music education, and public events centering the contributions of the Latinx immigrant community.

CLV has been an important and pioneering program for inclusive education and university-community partnership in our region during this time, and has required continual innovation and organizing for resources, on campus and off. But it would not have begun nor survived had there not been an increase in institutional awareness and resources for after-school programming and immigrant families in the school district. At the level of initial institutional collaboration, CLV’s partnership with the district was informed explicitly by awareness of a particular pressure point for (ELL)-classified students at the elementary-middle school transition. Those who did not reclassify as English proficient before middle school were not eligible to enroll in electives—which included science. Furthermore, there were minimal ELL resources in secondary schools, which raised barriers to reclassification after elementary school. In fact, in its earliest phase, CLV was conceptualized as a substitute for those missing resources at the middle school level. Initially, the program operated simultaneously at two schools that did not have existing after-school programs or staff–and was therefore not sustainable. However, just two years later, CLV began to flourish at an elementary school located very close to UCSC, where the district began to receive state support and to invest in both after-school programming and bilingual community resources. For instance, at about this time, in 2010, the district’s first free after-school program was launched, supported by After School Education and Safety, or ASES, with grant funding from the State of California. The ASES program at this school, which has consisted of nearly all Latinx students (K-5), has provided an after-school environment and infrastructure where CLV program could work two afternoons a week with fourth- and fifthgraders. At the same school, and at the same time, the district piloted its new Bilingual Community Coordinator (BCC) network with its first hire. The BCC organizer (who was also my partner) helped reshape the school into an openly bilingual, welcoming, and participatory environment for immigrant and Latinx families. The development of community trust and interpersonal, intercultural, and inter-institutional communication were the seeds and then the roots of CLV, making it a more “community-based,” rather than “community-engaged” program, with the capacity to develop curriculum and approaches that could be used on a much broader scale.

At the school where CLV has worked consistently, nearly all bilingual resources have been focused on K-3rd grade and students transition to English-Only in the fourth-grade. The school’s enrollment has fluctuated and generally shrunk from about 580 to 350 students as of this writing; but the ethnic proportions have stayed fairly stable, with Latinx students comprising 40–50% of the student body, White students at about the same proportion, and diverse students from other ethnic groups in small numbers. CLV’s learning communities have included nearly all of the ASES Program’s fourth and fifth-graders each year. These groups of 16–18 kids have usually included a few students who speak only Spanish, a few who speak and understand only English, and a majority with complex dual-language repertoires in Spanish and English. Mostly, they speak English in school spaces, and either have passed or are in the process of passing the English proficiency test (reclassification). CLV undergraduate mentor cohorts have usually averaged about 12–16 per group. The combinations of Spanish and English repertoires among mentors is diverse; most are from Spanish-speaking or dual-language homes. This group of about 35, including a faculty instructor (the author of this chapter) and, during some years, a classroom teacher, fills the largest classroom spaces at the school to the max. The main space is arranged in table groups seating two to four elementary students and their mentors. These spaces are also filled with sound: whether working on reading or creative projects, these small groups are always talking. As often as possible, dinámica activities happen outside, so everyone can move and have a break.

After school sessions in CLV are extremely busy. Kids who have spent all day in school somehow find it within themselves to work another solid two hours on highly complex, demanding projects. They connect deeply to the material, to the projects they are developing, and to their mentors, with whom they meet one-on-one or two-to-one every week. At the elementary school, various teachers have stepped into CLV rooms over the years, and expressed amazement. “It’s like they’re different kids in CLV,” one of them said to me. “They’re so engaged.” Another one looked around at the table groups talking and sighed deeply. “This is how it should be,” she said. “This has a really good feel.”

Challenging days happen—for instance, when there is standardized testing, reclassification testing for English proficiency, or parent-teacher conferences. On these days, when the opposing winds are stiffer than ever, the hardest thing for us to see is how the kids can turn on each other, or on themselves, reproducing weaponized and self-defeating language in the worst way. When that happens, the mentors have to work extra hard. They have to be not just more attentive to “their” kids, but stand up taller than ever to be “the village” that is raising all of them, and each other. Mentors need to be energetic and encouraging, no matter what kind of day they have had—and they need to model among themselves as well as with kids what solidarity sounds like. We need check-ins; but we also need activities where everyone is participating, supporting each other, and succeeding; the kids need to perceive the mentors’ smiling faces all around them like mirrors of their future selves, saying, “This is us, succeeding.”

Key Ideas: Program and Activity Designs—CLV Strategies for Consolidating Community Cultural Wealth and Shifting Cultural Power Patterns

The collective-participatory strategies built into CLV’s approach start with proactive, intentional space-making at every level of social design and curriculum. These space-making strategies change the balance of cultural power in two ways: (1) they work to build a strong, relevant learning community, able to access its own Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) or Funds of Knowledge (González et al., 2005), and to develop community context for sense-making, confidence, and resilience; and (2) they build active, change-making creative processes, with new norms for participating, and new opportunities for authorship and other social roles. By participating in these spaces, individuals and groups learn they are able and entitled to step beyond their socially inherited spots, develop new identities, and work actively with others to change their roles and the stories they find themselves in.

What Makes a Strong Community? Contrato-Council

The Opening Council of CLV is a semi-ritualized gathering of the community that launches the program each year, symbolically and spatially formalizing us as a community that values La Palabra (The Word). Participating in Council helps teach or reteach all of us how CLV’s activities work. First, especially for undergraduate mentors, the practice of planning spaces and arranging furniture—in this case in a big circle—is one of the most common ways we practice exerting “positive power” (versus authoritarian power) in the classroom, to create intentional and welcoming activities. At the Council, we explain the symbolism of the circle of chairs: we always leave an opening in the circle to symbolize our open hearts and minds, and the freedom of choice, to enter and leave; and we always leave one empty chair, to signal that we are open to new community members. Like the Wellbeing Club (Chap. 18) we use talking sticks to honor our turn-taking (“one mic” rule); and we signal when we are done talking by saying “Palabra” or “Word.” Like Council, each activity in CLV is a “space,” and an opportunity. Each one has norms for types of participation that are explained and practiced; but all of those norms are designed to facilitate fairness and kindness, so that each person has a chance to share who they are and what they have to say. Anyone can ask for help, and everyone there is available to offer it. Practicing these modes and norms develops a local culture for restorative justice before there are problems.

Second, the Opening Council is the visible and tangible social space where the community meets to hear from each person and see them vote (we put cards in a box in the center of the circle) to form our new Community Constitution (our Contrato). The Contrato, a wall poster we put up each day, is an explicit articulation of the group’s values and aspirations, and serves as a reminder and a resource for us as we make decisions during the year. The full Contrato development process has five steps: group brainstorming, individual selection and reasoning, all-group Council, document synthesis, and signing. Both the process and the result are essential for redefining power in our learning community, based on the kids’ values, goals, and words (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). When kids say they want a community filled with kindness, respect, and polite behavior, they are defining a positive role for mentors, who can serve the community by helping to support kids in achieving their goals, or facilitate problem-solving using concepts that come from the kids to help them achieve this.

Fig. 3.2
A photo of a pinned poster with handwritten text titled in a foreign language. The text emphasizes the qualities of respecting boundaries, inclusivity, upliftment, inspiration, teamwork, and caring for community space.

The 2018–2019 Contrato. While most of the ideas come from the kids, undergraduate mentors help guide the community by providing language they have learned in group work, like “respect boundaries,” using the “one mic rule”

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Fig. 3.3
2 photos of colorful joined charts with handwritten texts in a foreign language. Both of them have listed points marked with asterisks.

The Spanish version of Contrato 2019–2020. This year, the theme of “spaces” (safe space and brave space—espacio seguro, espacio valiente) was very strong

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The first step, brainstorming toward the question “What makes a strong community?” is broken into four sub-questions (or big, open-ended “spaces”) on sheets of newsprint. One of these four questions asks, “What do good team members say to each other?” We found this question tapped into a treasure chest of Community Cultural Wealth, in the form of kids’ best sportsmanship, best-friendship, highest solidarity, and most tender family language. All of this could be made available as classroom learning language. At first, these phrases were synthesized in our Contrato as concepts. But through practice, by actually using our Contrato during the program year as a resource, we found that when kids’ actual words were kept whole in our poster, the entire endeavor had more power, depth, and usefulness to all of us, in a variety of circumstances. Now, these phrases of encouragement go directly into our document, as part of our community word bank. Among the many phrases collected over the years are the following:

Nice one, compadre! #yougogirl! We got this. I got your back. Don’t worry, you’ll get it next time. I like your shirt. Teamwork is the dreamwork! No te preocupes, ahorita se limpia (Don’t worry, we’ll clean that right up). We’ll figure this out. Buen trabajo! (Good job!) Vamos! Adelante! (Let’s go!) No te des por vencido (Don’t give up). Do you want me to share first? Do you want to say something else? Good luck!

All parts of this participatory, collaborative literacy activity are iconic of the CLV approach overall. The process gathers valuable community words that we can all learn from and use positively, and from the first week of CLV, it tangibly shifts power roles: the kids, in effect, are teaching adults and each other what we need to do and say to create a productive learning community for all of us; and as co-authors of the community, the kids step into much stronger, agentive places of accountability.

Daily Activity Structure for Building and Sharing Power

The CLV program structure chart (Table 3.1) shows the basic design we use to build program curricula, co-manage the classroom, and communicate with anyone who needs to know what we are doing. The three-part design is based on an intentional, and fairly predictable, series of interactive learning opportunities that build relationships, new practices, and symbolic repertoires throughout each program session as well as over the span of the quarter or year. Each program day starts with Poder de la Palabra (Power of the Word) at tables in one-on-one or small groups, and includes text-enrichment elements (reading, learning from videos, new ideas, discussion). It pivots in the middle with “Dinámica,” which brings everyone together as a whole class for activity instructions, then scrambles the groups and explodes into movement, usually outside. The last half of the day settles into a continuation of project work (Proyecto), usually in groups—this is where kids are able to really create and invest in their own ideas, developing complex work over time.

Table 3.1 CLV program structure
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On an organizational and development level, having a clear activity chart makes it possible to share power and responsibility in the classroom. Having delineated activity types and overall goals for each segment allows for a team-teaching structure; activity innovation and assessment based on overall opportunity or transformative effects; and classroom self-regulation, rather than reliance on top-down coordination. A clear, predictable structure is also important for diverse learners, including linguistically diverse communities; and for trauma-informed classrooms, both of which describe our situation.

This structured, relatively stable design also has important pedagogical functions. Kris Gutiérrez (1993) elaborates on the learning benefits of activity-type predictability. She explains how clearly delineated activity types work as a guide for both learners and early-career educators, because the activity schedule functions as a kind of initial universe of “role assignments” that people can then improvise within. There are also important benefits of having multiple types of activities or interaction opportunities within program space. Gutiérrez and Jurow’s (2016) study of social design for equity explains in detail how different types of activities stimulate different domains of knowing; build repertoires in shared space; and help writers build confidence and momentum as they construct their narratives. The case studies they describe share significant features with CLV.

In CLV, the development of “third space” belonging and the shared symbolic repertoire in the classroom is noticeable within two or three weeks, but it is not immediate or linear, and it is very often expressed in English, at least initially. The process of building community context and individual confidence in communication moves micro-genetically and recursively, from dyadic relationships and small groups into larger spaces and back again, in each session. The program also uses a combination of consistent structure or routine with novel activities, texts, and topics; each mentor has the autonomy to adapt the day’s activities with the students around them to engage each person’s interests and to let memories and thoughts attached to their languages and families circulate in school space. Depending on the cohort, the “language barrier” maintained in an English-only school environment may break sooner rather than later; and since the CLV aim is to show students how they can feel empowered in learning, we are attentive to ways students might increasingly step into or appropriate the spaces or materials we make available (Figs. 3.4 and 3.5).

Fig. 3.4
A top-view photo of 2 men who work on an Apple desktop computer. One of the men has his hands on the keyboard. The screen displays the digital artwork with 2 photos and texts.

Mentoring digital artwork and writing. Activities in “The Power of the Word” vary, but they all include working with texts: reading, talking it out, and writing. The modality matters less than relationality. When it’s time for creative process and close editing work on projects, dyads and teams already know how to work together

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Fig. 3.5
A photo of 2 women who sit in front of an Apple desktop commuter positioned on a desk lining the wall. One of the women points a finger at the screen, while the other holds a mouse. Another desktop computer is placed on the desk to the right.

Learning how to make a Prezi to present Spring research on “Sea Lion Crisis.” In Corre la Voz, honoring kids’ culture, their values, and their right to develop starts with asking what they care about and then supports their process of pursuing it

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Poder de la Palabra: Power of the Word

The “Power of the Word” segment of the program has been the most difficult to develop and sustain, because it can sometimes be both “most like school,” and also most directly divergent from school and community norms. Development of this segment has also proven to make the most difference in growth for all members of the learning community, in all domains. The activities vary dramatically in this activity space, but are best described as relationship-building, and as cultivating skills and repertoire that community members can later draw from.

For instance, throughout the Fall quarter that the “Black Hood” group started work on their story, the Power of the Word segment of the program consisted of small-group reading aloud, discussing, and response-writing about Julia Alvarez’s novel When Tia Lola Came to Visit/Stay. In Winter, weeks after the moment described in the vignette, the group began creating a classroom scene for their movie that revolved around that novel as a prop, practicing it over and over until they got it the way they wanted it. The scene opens with students seated in a row, reading Tia Lola. The action rolls with bullying by the VSCO Girl, who turns to her neighbor: “I like your shoes. What kind are they? Oh, are they leather? That’s sooo bad for the planet. My mom is going to take a bunch of us to the mall today after school to get all-vegan Vans. Maybe you can come too.” The Latina Teacher (a mentor) comes in and greets the class, and introduces a New Student (who is also the character bringing the truth from another school about Black Hood). The social capital of his character is established when the teacher asks the students to define a Spanish word from Tia Lola. The “math smarty-pants” is unable to answer the teacher’s question (“No, I’m sorry, that’s incorrect”), but the New Student (who is also bringing the truth about Black Hood) raises his hand and smoothly translates the word to English. “Yes, that is correct, very good,” says the teacher.

In this scene, along with many others in this movie, CLV youth mobilized multiple symbolic tools to tell a story about injustice and justice, moral and immoral conduct at school. It was clear that reading Tia Lola together in CLV expanded their range of tools to do that.

Dinámica: Latin American Techniques for Democratizing Space

The “Dinámica” component of the program is among the most important and liberating teaching techniques that reshape and resocialize literacy activities in CLV. Dinámicas, along with role-play and improvisational drama techniques that are built into many of the program’s pedagogies, are directly informed by Latin American toolkits for changing inherited and institutional power relations. As other University-Community Links (UC Links) colleagues demonstrate in their work on play (Chap. 6), these techniques expand or rupture internally rigid classroom space and role definitions; and their engagement of whole-self, multisensory learning processes and pleasure makes them highly effective. (For more information about UC Links visit https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/.)

Dinámica techniques (técnicas participativas, or participatory techniques) have been an essential component of Latin American (Freirean) popular education/action research methods since the 1960s, and Latin American institutes of informal and participatory learning continue to specialize in these crafts (See Montero & Varas Díaz, 2007). Dinámicas are holistic, multimodal learning activities designed to change the state of consciousness or capacity of individuals in group contexts (Fig. 3.6). Agency is released, activated, and expanded through participatory games or short learning activities that connect people with their senses, the world around them, and each other, through movement and enactment. Instead of being focused on texts or objects or leaders, their awareness—and their power—comes back into their bodies and is connected to the group.

Fig. 3.6
A photo of a girl who holds the hand of a blindfold girl while navigating through the maze drawn with chalks on the road. Several people stand behind them in front of a fence, and some of them engage in conversation.

Blindfolded labyrinth-walk dinámica. This activity builds trust and teamwork—and language skills. The person without a blindfold uses careful directional words to guide their partner’s steps through the maze

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Although dinámicas very often draw on game play, and game objectives may work as the primary focus of the group (e.g., crossing the finish line together), dinámica planners also work with subtext, phenomenology, and metacognitive learning objectives. For instance, many CLV dinámicas use actual theater warm-up activities (Fig. 3.7). Sometimes these activities are direct preparation for developing dramatic films, but they can also stand alone. Conceptually, it is tempting to think of these activities as a “break” from close-visual focus and intense cognitive work—because they are—but they are also an integral part of the pedagogy of transforming group practice. As the Boalean tradition teaches us (Boal, et al., 1979; Boal, 2002), drama and play help people focus in new ways by connecting to each other and to their feelings, and by releasing trapped potential to make change in our lives.

Fig. 3.7
A photo of a woman who helps a girl in wearing a face mask with long glittery feathers. A rack loaded with baskets and products is in the background.

Getting dressed for a dramatic film production involving extraterrestrial characters. Creative, collaborative storytelling is a liberating space for trying out alternative identities and taking risks in truth-telling

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Even light, fun dinámicas incorporate shared imaginaries by introducing symbolic props, role-play premises, or new ways of seeing the world, like: “This energy game is called ‘Comandante Siete’ (Major 7), and when you get to 7, you have to salute;” or “Work in teams of three on this Scavenger Hunt; today, you are bringing back photos of things that are transparent, translucent, and opaque.” Lesson plans artfully use groupings, time, movement, and communication challenges to achieve some sort of group change—in energy, understanding, confidence, or other capacities. They can be easy, fun, energetic, wildly interactive, or reflective.

One apparently simple Dinámica we have used is “Category Ball.” This word play, based on analytical/conceptual grouping, is helpful when kids are disconnected for any number of reasons. The game can produce connective-verbal patterns with very reserved or shy groups where a number of kids are not accustomed to responding in class; it can build connective focus among kids who are not yet relating to each other or to mentors; it can also work to bring Spanish into school space. Groups stand in medium-sized circles on the playground, and the facilitator of the circle calls out a category, like “Candy bars!” Players bounce the ball toward another member, who catches it, and then has to think of a type of candy bar within a couple seconds. The facilitator has to keep the categories intentional, relevant, and stimulating; the next category might be “Dinner food!” Mentors in the circle should be prepared to start modeling how to answer this with familiar food: “Enchiladas!” Bounce-catch. “Tacos de asada!” Bounce-catch. Faces light up. “Pozole rojo!” They start elaborating: “Lentejas con plátano y huevo cocido!” (Laughter.) They start talking in between bounces about whose mom makes the best pozole, and we are off and running in a new direction.

A Sample Project: Community Cultural Wealth and Public Voice through Photovoice

CLV’s dramatic film-making, photovoice, and research documentary curricula have developed enormously in 14 years. Among CLV’s most useful findings have been the discovery of key parameters and stepwise activities that offer the most productive kinds of support for long-term projects. The goal in collaborative, creative project curriculum development for these two-part teams (mentors and kids) is to provide enough guidance and stimulation at the start of each day so that individuals will feel drawn in, but will still have the freedom to create, changing the plan as necessary (Fig. 3.8). This always entails sensitive, dialogic work with current learning community members, and is difficult to synthesize.

Fig. 3.8
A photo of 4 people, including children, who stand around a camera tripod with a room, with one of them wearing a headphone and 2 others engaging in setting the camera. Another person stands on the right and gazes at them. Desks, chairs, and tables are in the background.

“Black Hood” film crew, Winter 2020

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In 2015–2016, CLV took on a classic “civic engagement” project—the Beach Flats Community Garden photovoice project. Unlike most CLV projects, this project space and its set of parameters were preconceptualized by adults, directed at outside adults, and involved the entire group. Also unlike most CLV projects, this project depended on rare external circumstances— a moment of relevant community activism—that made it productive for our group to extend beyond school grounds. Despite these differences, many aspects of this project illuminate CLV’s way of working; it is an especially vivid example of how the collective-participatory process gathers Community Cultural Wealth, weaves it together, and transforms it into more powerful expressions of voice.

The opportunity to participate in the project was a larger community movement to defend the Beach Flats Community Garden, located in one of the most important Latino neighborhoods in Santa Cruz, and one of the most chronically misrepresented—and also home to a number of CLV families. As part of that socially diverse movement, CLV organized a photovoice documentary project that first studied the overall problem in the classroom; then traveled to the Garden to study it hands-on, using interview, photography, and of course immersion tools for inquiry; and then developed students’ perspectives and findings each year into photovoice letters that were sent to the City Council.

During Poder de la Palabra/Power of the Word, we read about the community’s problem online, using news articles. The Garden, cultivated by volunteers over 25 years into a Mesoamerican permaculture spot that provided the neighborhood with free fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers, and space for events, had been notified by landlords its lease was up. Neighbors wanted the City of Santa Cruz to intervene by purchasing and preserving the property, which provided the only green space and source of fresh food within walking distance.

During one Proyecto Time, the classroom teacher and I, along with undergraduate mentors, convened group discussion with the kids, brainstorming and collecting overall questions that came out of the research. Students who lived in the neighborhood provided important perspectives and offered sharp questions for us to consider. For instance, one student and Beach Flats resident raised his hand: “I have a question: like, which side is the City Council really on?” Another day, using preprinted pages developed by faculty with input from mentors (which we call “scaffolds”), kids worked one-on-one or in small groups with their mentors to review who they would be meeting (an elder gardener, Don Emilio, and a young volunteer) and to draft individual questions for the field trip. Mentor-student groups also reviewed the photo-documentation inquiry prompt: “work with your mentor and each other to take pictures and notes about anything that is beautiful, important, or interesting to you.”

After the field trip, back at school, we found the kids’ photos were beautiful, unique, and clear; their messages were equally compelling and eloquent. The first year, we assembled their photovoice panels in a large Google slidedeck as a letter to City Council. Each student researcher had two slides to fill, and worked with mentors to select the photos that were the most “beautiful, interesting, and important”—as well as to create a message to City Council explaining their thoughts. I included a cover sheet asking the Council to consider the kids’ perspectives. The second year, kids worked in groups of two and developed much more extensive layouts and messages using digital newsletter formats to explain their points of view. Many of the photo-messages from the kids to the Council tried to get the Council to understand what the value of the place and the plants were: “This is a delicious chayote. You have to take the spikes off before you can eat it.” Some tried to induce empathy:

Don Emilio and others have worked there most of their life and all that hard work is going to go down the drain if you take it away. Would you like it if someone took away something that you have worked for your whole life?

One was direct and fierce:

We don’t believe that you will only leave a little space and we’re worried that you will take everything away from our community. I think you are being unfair because you are taking the garden when you have other choices. If the farmers have to go to different places, they won’t have a big space to come together in a positive way. They need a special place to meet in the neighborhood. Please let the farmers keep ALL of their land!

For more detail on this project, see Glowa et al. (2015) and the blogpost “Elotes and Eviction: Snapshot Perspectives from Youth on the Beach Flats Community Garden” here: https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/chapter3.

Discussion

Most of CLV’s digital projects are introspective and reflective, if not explicitly, then as meta-text: they are about process; they are recordings of a learning community talking to itself about itself, in a space they feel is their own. They are often funny, provocative, inspiring, poignant, surreal; sometimes, they take “art-house” genre to a new level. They are always beautiful, at least to those of us who have had the privilege to know the authors and to witness the process. In contrast, the Beach Flats Garden photovoice project was a brief opportunity for the kids to speak directly and collectively to an outside adult audience about the value of their community—about what is beautiful, interesting, and important to them; and how they felt about the disrespect and threats (Fig. 3.9). I would argue that ALL of that space is necessary, and should be defended.

Fig. 3.9
A photo of a person's hands holding Mesoamerican dried corn beans in their palms.

Mesoamerican corn shared at the Beach Flats Garden

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CLV was one of the first UC Links programs up and running during COVID-19. Personal, long-standing relationships with the school and with families, and the program’s already-digitized work environment made this transition fairly fluid; kids willingly logged on each week, using loaner Chromebooks and hotspots. But the most determinant plus-factor for continuity was the existing mentor cohort that Spring, and the team of three paid undergraduate program assistants, who were not only dedicated to the kids and the program, but were already skilled in creative problem-solving and community-building. Together, they came up with new organizing systems to “translate” the learning community into flat digital space. Over the following years, we learned how to create video interviews and photovoice digital projects online, and even engage in Dinámicas over Zoom and in hybrid conditions. Becoming “de-sited” actually allowed CLV to reach new schools and new groups of students—including those who had recently arrived in the United States—and we were able to work more closely with families. As a result, CLV was able to solidify its longer-term agreements with Santa Cruz City Schools; we broadened family awareness and a keen interest in Corre la Voz throughout the community; and we formed a new partnership with a grassroots immigrant organization, Senderos.

During these same years, the establishment of an Education Major at UCSC, new faculty interest in CLV, and new hiring opened opportunities for program development that had never before existed since the program was founded. At this juncture, it is possible that the CLV program will finally be integrated into UCSC’s departmental offerings, and thus be able to work at scale and draw on the many talents and other resources in our region, through inter-institutional agreements. At this moment, however, those plans are pending, since the previous funding arrangement for the undergraduate course has fallen through, and programming has been interrupted. We hope the community-based strategies CLV cultivated and curated can continue to be elaborated and adapted to serve many more generations, both here and elsewhere.