Transitions and Transformations

Abstract

University-community engagement involves the co-construction of “knots of collaboration” that must be reconstructed again and again in ever-changing contexts in which participants necessarily expand their perspectives on the task at hand. This chapter provides a greater understanding of this process of integrative learning and its relation to expansive learning by viewing the historical development of UC Links programs such as La Clase Mágica through the trifocal lens of the sociotechnical activity system. The example of LCM demonstrates how, as university and community participants engage, they find overlaps in their diverse perspectives and begin to integrate them. In this expansive learning process, the university and community participants come to approach each other as equal partners in mutual relations of exchange that provide for the bidirectional flow of cultural knowledge between disparate and often irreconcilable cultural systems, and for the integration of multiple funds of knowledge.