Displacement and Dialogue

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors draw on UC Links research to define university-community engagement as a form of expansive learning. Through comparative analysis of various program sites, the authors examine how UC Links community and university partners have worked together to build programmatic strategies for re-engaging disengaged students through innovative learning activities that have been developed in collaboration and through a process of critical dialoguing between community and university people. The authors begin with an ethnographic look at Oakland Y-PLAN (Youth – Plan, Learn, Act, Now) to show how these activities exemplify young people's expansive learning and how adults and young people from the university, the community, and multiple local organizations and agencies have learned how to work together productively – in other words, how they have learned to listen to each other's voices to transform the oppressive structures of the past and present and, in this way, envision and build a more equitable future.