Learning Lessons of Endurance: Long-Term Community-University Research Design

• In Event: Historicizing University-Community Links at 30: Proleptic Learnings in Resistance, Responsiveness, and Reimagining Education

Abstract

This paper examines long-term community-university partnership as it shifts, endures and envisions the future of a partnership established in March 2007. This UC Links program offers a case study of sustained engagement between a research initiative—Democracy Lab—and an after-school program offered by a local family learning center (TCLC) that also aims to provide apartment complex residents economic development support and civic engagement. Through a university practicum course, interdisciplinary undergraduate students learn through design practices that build on a variety of media, play, and project-based educational activities to enhance a learning environment that mutually serves TCLC’s K-12 residents, community members and UCSD undergraduates. Democracy Lab at TCLC designs and studies intergenerational opportunities for students to embody mutual principles of living. University-community partnerships provide important learning opportunities through design for lived-learning experiences of robust and challenging concepts, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, that are far too often reduced to thin readings as bureaucratic or ideological constructs rather than the practical acts of a democratic society in action (Author3, 2020).

The partnership builds on the original 5th Dimension model also linked to UCSD’s Communication Department and is rooted in the tenets of the UC Links network (see Session Summary). Undergraduates learn how communication and learning are mediated through practical experience that is informed by participatory design, cultural-historical theories of learning, and principles of mutual learning and development (Author2, 2016; Author1, 2016; Author3, 2023). Youth and families learn about varied pathways for learning and civic practice, ways of accessing higher education, and intergenerational and plural forms of community engagement. We examine activity through the lens of a sociotechnical activity system and focus on the impacts of macrosocial forces on the primary work system (Jackson, 2014; Author 2, 2016; Author, 2021). Importantly, our analysis attends to a present sociopolitical climate in which active efforts around the world aim to dismantle or undermine initiatives focused on how to build shared life together—across our differences—to achieve mutually respectful and caring social worlds (Ishimaru, 2014).

Data analysis focuses on four critical periods of significant change or strain during this twenty-year partnership whose substantive impact could only become clear over time. Data includes years of undergraduate field notes and collaborative projects over time alongside interviews with community members and the center director included in a short documentary film addressing how community is created and sustained at TCLC. Our paper’s goal is threefold. First, we identify key moments where roles, collective goals, or institutional commitments shifted (Author, 2021); second, we draw out emergent practices and lessons that supported mutual benefit, adaptive co-creation, and student and community development. Rather than positioning sustainability as a linear achievement, we argue that it is an ongoing, iterative and proleptic process of re-imagining roles, re-negotiating commitments, and re-aligning goals in response to changing social and economic conditions. Third, we apply what we have learned through long-term partnership and long-form research design to inform the design of future after-school education programs and to envision what these findings imply for informal learning contexts broadly.

Authors

• Camille Campion, University of California - San Diego

• Angela N. Booker, University of California - San Diego

• Veverly Anderson, Town & Country Learning Center