UC Links: A Summary

Friends from the Whittier Fifth Dimension UC Links after-school program.

For many youth, after-school care and additional time for educational pursuits are the first steps on the road to higher learning. University-Community Links is a network of program sites providing access to quality educational resources and activities for children from diverse, low-income communities throughout the world. As a collaborative venture among community, school, and university partners, UC Links helps create a safe, welcoming place and an engaging environment for interactive learning among older and younger peers. UC Links complements students’ in-school learning and gets them started early on the path to higher education.

During the 2004-05 school year, the UC Links network has brought together school and university students in over 40 program sites. These sites operate throughout the United States (in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, and North Carolina), as well as in Brazil, Mexico, Finland, Spain, and Sweden. The global nature of UC Links helps students at all levels to gain an understanding of the increasingly international context in which they will need to interact as adults.

As an international network, UC Links occupies a strategic niche among educational efforts aimed at the academic and social preparation of school children and youth.

• UC Links is a university faculty initiative that connects the academic preparation of K-12 students to the education of university students. The program links school- and community-based activities for K-12 youth to the academic mainstream of university life, improves the quality of undergraduate and graduate education, and contributes to our understanding of contemporary education for diverse student populations, while bringing under-served youth together with positive undergraduate role models.

• UC Links transforms undergraduate education by connecting theory with practice. UC Links coursework offers undergraduates the opportunity to contribute to local communities while deepening their understanding of academic course content. Through field experience working with children in informal learning settings, undergraduates gain important insights into theoretical concepts related to their coursework in fields as diverse as Anthropology, Communications, Education, Human Development, Information Technology, Psychology, Sociology, and Urban and Regional Planning. They also have an opportunity to gain first-hand experience and explore careers in teaching.

• UC Links serves students starting at the early stages of the academic pipeline. UC Links largely serves students at the elementary and middle school levels, and sets them early on a college-going path through engaging learning activities.

• UC Links is inclusive, supporting children who are struggling in school, as well as those who do well. While many educational programs serve students who are already doing well in school, UC Links programs are open to all children and youth in the host school or community. By giving youth from low-income or language-minority communities extra support early in their school careers, UC Links enables them to overcome obstacles they face to their academic development.

• UC Links provides support for youth in the crucial after-school hours. At a time of day when youth are most vulnerable to the hazards of living in poverty, UC Links offers a safe place, meaningful activities, and additional time to pursue their interest in higher learning.

• UC Links is a collaborative network that crosses institutional boundaries. UC Links helps create programs for K-12 youth by building upon the community-based efforts of community agencies, groups and families, schools and faith-based organizations, as well as faculty and students from universities and colleges in communities all over the world.

As a university-community initiative, UC Links is distinctive in that it fulfills the university’s threefold mission, integrating community service with teaching and research. UC Links program sites provide quality learning opportunities for local school children, but also represent valuable fieldwork settings where university faculty and students, together with community and school partners, create engaging educational programs for youth while also developing quality educational experiences for university undergraduate and graduate.

To provide quality learning activities for local children and youth, UC Links engages university undergraduate and graduate students in practicum coursework that places them in after-school programs in school and community settings. As part of their course requirements, the university students observe and interact closely with school children participating in the community-based program. Each program site represents a close collaboration among university faculty, staff, and students, school teachers and staff, and community organizations, groups, and individuals. As such, the program is highly adaptable. Each program site selects and adapts available resources and materials to co-construct the program on the basis of local concerns – including participants’ language, culture, and community perspectives.

UC Links faculty, staff, and students, together with their community and school partners, continue to explore and develop after-school activities and evaluation strategies to assess the benefits of these activities for K-12 and undergraduate youth. A number of sites, especially those focusing on supporting participants’ literacy skills, have adapted a rubric developed by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and UC Los Angeles to track the development of children’s writing abilities’ others use a literacy assessment tool developed at UC Irvine. These rubrics are included in the evaluation section of this website. Many sites will also evaluate undergraduate learning by adapting a pre-test/post-test undergraduate survey, which can also be found in the evaluation section of this website.