Community Mapping at the Turn of the Tide: System-Research that Builds Collaborative Culture and Resiliency

• In Event: Envisioning Futures in Times of Crisis: Lessons from School-University-Community Partnership Research & Practice

Abstract

This presentation shares the methods and some initial findings of the Tu Voz Cuenta/Your Voice Matters Project (TVC), conducted primarily by undergraduate students, January-June 2025 to map and strengthen collaborative afterschool learning and development systems in a small California city. The presentation provides a detailed example of well-resourced, community-based school/university/community collaborative research at a time of transition and upheaval. The project was designed as a post-Covid recovery opportunity that would involve under-represented stakeholders in new designs for university-community afterschool programming. Instead, the methodology, including Spanish-language access, worked to reveal and acknowledge a larger, submerged conflict, between collaborative culture and a process of social dissolution impacting learning systems, families, and children.

The TVC project is part of the larger University-Community Links network and builds on 15+ years of university-community partnership that supports immigrant youth in an afterschool teaching-learning lab. Community participants consisted of two knowledgeable and impacted groups typically not consulted in afterschool designs: 1) Latinx parents; and 2) school or youth program coordinators. Most were women. Student researchers conducted, recorded, and transcribed 17 interviews, two focus groups, and a “power tree” at a community workshop. More than half the participants contributed in Spanish.

The community mapping approach used in the TVC project has been developed over a period of ten years, as a Participatory Action Research undergraduate course. The approach uses multiple methods and works in stages to draw out diverse positionalities and community-identified terms for “asset and barrier” analysis and future cycles of participatory problem-solving (Delgado and Delgado, 2013). Students are trained to facilitate conversations using what Mathie and Cunningham call “appreciative inquiry” (2003), so under-represented community members can find their places as citizens, who name, explain, and analyze their situation.

The TVC project built community capacity this year by convening a meaningful and sustained conversation about matters important to families and students, effectively breaking through disempowering siloes. Ghiso et al. (2022) explain how community-based research partnerships may establish or sustain an “intellectual commons of care” that is essential to community resistance. Similarly, Cheong (2006) shows how thoughtful design and practice can develop a community of “storytelling” spaces that build social capital, especially important for immigrant communities.

In this case, both the networking process and the data gathered served to articulate clearer visions for community-defined afterschool programming–as well as a mosaic of hope, insight, and collaborative skill that suggested pathways for achieving it. Participants also filled in details about problems and silences that had to be addressed as part of ongoing collaborative work: unsafe and exclusionary conditions in schools and programs; patterns of disconnection, turnover, rigidity, inaccessibility, and lack of resources. The most commonly named barrier was language and lack of information; and the most frequently named problems were behavior and discipline, connected to a crisis landscape that is pushing kids and families out, and leaving them stranded.

The unanticipated and powerful results of this project leave researchers and participants with new options, new shared clarity, and new questions about next steps, shared in the presentation.

Author

• Leslie A. Lopez, University of California - Santa Cruz