Vol. 1, No. 1 | Spring 2002
Participants in the La Clase Mágica UC Links program in the Orange Place housing complex in Escondido.
WORKING TOGETHER
In San Diego County, several UC Links sites, called La Clase Mágica, engage children in computer-based literacy activities during and after the school day. Collaborators from UC San Diego and from individual communities work together to develop activities for each La Clase Mágica site. These activities are designed to meet the cultural, linguistic, and learning needs of local children. The first La Clase Mágica site (St. Leo's Mission, Solana Beach) has been offering informal educational activities to neighborhood children and adults since 1989. The long-standing success of this site has inspired other communities to develop La Clase Mágica programs, in schools and in community centers, as this story illustrates. Professors Olga Vásquez (Communication, UC San Diego) and Ross Frank (Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego) are principal investigators for the three new sites described here.
La Clase Mágica: New Communities of Learners
BY VICTORIA GARCIA AND ANGELICA MARCELLO
Opening a new UC Links site is an opportunity for active learning for all involved. Young people improve their literacy skills by playing with computers, while adults come to learn how local children acquire a strong academic foundation so they can successfully negotiate the culture of school. In the process of adapting UC Links computer-based activities to meet a community's needs, collaborators share resources and challenge each other to learn how learning is accomplished in a new context. This is what we're doing in three new La Clase Mágica (LCM) sites in San Diego County.
Orange Place
Raul stands in the front yard of an apartment in the Orange Place housing complex, waiting for the undergraduate students and research assistants from UC San Diego to arrive at the first LCM site to be established in Escondido, California. He looks forward to seeing fifteen-year-old Jason, his favorite high school volunteer, who, along with other adolescents and adults from La Clase Mágica, assists him and his friends in the after-school computer club that takes place in the Learning Center of the housing complex. La Clase Mágica staff members, including Orange Place site coordinators Selene Duran and Lourdes Duran, help children with computers and school work at each session, but we also help with other activities important to participants.
In less than a year, LCM staff members have earned the trust and friendship of more than twenty participating children like Raul. Through this relationship, we have come to learn that a community center, especially one within a housing complex, is an ideal space for after-school activities, because children don't have to leave the safety of their homes in order to participate. We've also learned that religion is important to many of the thirty-two families living at Orange Place, as some children study their prayers after completing homework and leave site as soon as the session is over to attend church. We are pleased that children and parents understand the nature of La Clase Mágica and our goals and objectives. Jessica summarizes these points as she tells a recent visitor from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, "Here we learn as we have fun!"
Pauma Valley
Twenty miles northeast, in Pauma Valley, a group of five children walk with Victoria Garcia, a research assistant working to establish an LCM site at Pauma School. They walk from the children's kindergarten classroom to the school library. The children can hardly keep themselves from running to the five brightly colored iMac computers, and Victoria would like to give them the freedom to do just that. She realizes, however, that we are working within the more structured environment of a school, and we must be sensitive to the needs of the teachers, administrators, and librarians whose space we share.
Victoria's concerns disappear when the children welcome her with wide grins. They relish the time they spend with her and Lourdes at the computers, even though we devote the first meetings to formal evaluations of children's computer literacy. The forty-seven participants from kindergarten and first grade classes at Pauma know that during their thirty-minute session, they will have a computer and an adult partner all to themselves. This is their special time at LCM.
We would like to work with the remainder of the 310 K-8 students at Pauma, of whom 58 percent are Hispanic/Latino, 33 percent are American Indian, and 9 percent are White. However, because we have limited undergraduate assistance, we focus our attention on those children with the greatest academic need, as indicated by SAT-9 scores in math and literacy.
When older children enter the library and curiously glance over to see what their younger schoolmates are working on, it is apparent that they would love to be part of the activity. In fact, Victoria isn't surprised when second-grade students ask when it will be their turn to go to the computers, or when little Alyssa thanks her as the two of them walk to the lunch room following an LCM session. Then Alyssa yells "I love you," and skips away, reminding us once again why we are here.
San Pasqual American Indian Reservation
On a mountain, near beautiful Lake Wohlford, Joshua dons headphones to play a computer game. He's a member of the Even Start Program at the San Pasqual American Indian Reservation, where we are beginning to implement La Clase Mágica for the children in kindergarten to third grade.
A few months following our first visit, Angelica Marcello, a UC San Diego doctoral student helping Professors Olga Vásquez (Communication, UC San Diego) and Ross Frank (Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego) establish the new site, is honored by an invitation to dance with community children to the rhythm of Kumeyaay bird songs. This is an entirely new experience for Angelica, who is from Venice, Italy. There, and in the U.S. university where Angelica is a graduate student, teachers explain procedures step by step. Older community members at the Reservation, however, challenge the children to learn through careful observation, imitation of their peers, and self-reflection. When the adults invite Angelica to dance with the children, she feels accepted by a community entirely different from her own, and this frees her to be absorbed by the song and dance.
Angelica and Victoria, and other staff members of La Clase Mágica, understand that it takes plenty of time and effort to earn a community's trust before we may implement activities in their space. We believe that earning trust is a crucial part of the active learning process. Although the time it takes may challenge our implementation efforts, building trust provides a unique opportunity for exchanging knowledge with our new partners.
Victoria Garcia and Angelica Marcello are research assistants at UC San Diego and site coordinators of new UC Links sites in Escondido, Pauma, and San Pasqual. Victoria has been working with Professor Olga Vásquez and La Clase Mágica since 1999. Angelica is a graduate student in the UC San Diego department of Anthropology.
Working Together
La Clase Mágica: New Communities of Learners
HumaniFest Online: Linking Humanities Out There and the Whittier Fifth Dimension
The Magical Web Fifth Dimension
Digital Storytelling in West Oakland
Brianna Guillermo-Newton, Miranda Cheang, and Robyn Rachac
Links for Kids
How to Make Links: Social Capital and Community-University Collaboration