A Community-Engaged Effort: Co-Constructing College Knowledge in a Multilingual Community (Poster 1)

• In Event: University-Community Engagement as a Strategy for Dismantling Racial Injustice and Co-Constructing Educational Possibilities

Abstract

Most 21st century jobs now require some degree of postsecondary education (Carnevale et al., 2016; Savitz-Romer, 2019; United States Department of Education, 2017). For these reasons, K-12 school systems have begun to attend to the ways students’ college and career interests are developed and supported. Yet most college preparatory activities are directed at students enrolled in middle and high school. Students in elementary schools seem to go unnoticed in these college-going efforts (ACT, 2009; Wood & Kaszubowski, 2008). This qualitative study examines how undergraduates, mostly students of color and/or first-generation college students, elicited and mediated young children’s understandings of college at “B-Club,” a play-based, multilingual afterschool program for elementary school students in central Los Angeles.


We take a sociocultural/sociohistorical approach to the teaching and learning occurring at B-Club and as such recognize children as “knowing subjects'' (Luttrell, 2010, p. 225). Important to this work is asking ourselves what we stand to learn from children about their own understandings of the world they inhabit and in this particular case their understandings about college. For this paper, we focus on the ways undergraduate students mediated kids’ understandings (Diaz & Flores, 2001) of college and built on their college knowledge through a variety of social interactions (Vygotsky, 1978), including letter-writing, creating photojournals, and mapping life journeys. Given the particular historical moment where attacks on affirmative action are mounting (Belsha, 2023), we find it important to highlight how this particular “community of learners” (Rogoff, 1994), in which children from families that migrated from Mexico and Central America and undergraduate students who identified as first-generation college students, came together to think about college.


Our findings highlight how undergraduates saw kids as knowledge bearers and the various ways in which they co-constructed knowledge about college with them. We first note how undergraduates learnt the importance of affirming kids’ sociocultural knowledge. In their fieldnotes, undergraduate students discussed how much more fruitful their conversations were when they accounted and built on kids’ interests. We also highlight the ways in which undergraduates approached their role as sociocultural mediators (Diaz & Flores, 2001). Taking the stance of learner rather than expert, they used questions to probe kids’ knowledge about college. For example, one undergraduate shared how he used B-Club kids’ knowledge as a springboard to more nuanced discussions about college. Finally, we discuss how undergraduates took the time to leverage tools, like social media, that B-club kids were familiar with in order to make college more meaningful to them. Our work reveals the wealth of knowledge that elementary school students already possess about college. Identifying and expanding upon this should be the goal of all educators, including educational researchers who wish to support college readiness across K-12 contexts.

Authors

• Sophia L. Angeles, Pennsylvania State University

• Marjorie E. Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles