On April 9th, Charles and I visited the St. Cornelius ECUC Expanded Learning Program at St. Cornelius school in Richmond, CA. The after-school program, developed and carried out by Professor Glynda Hull (UC Berkeley) and her dedicated staff and students, is a 21st Century Community Learning Center (CCLC) and part of the East Bay Collaborative for Underserved Children (ECUC). The ECUC supports three other parochial schools, including schools in Oakland and Richmond serving primarily Latinx and African American children from low-income communities, and undergraduates and graduate students from Cal attend each of these programs. Compiled photos are available in a Google movie and a Google Photo album
UC Berkeley: Education 140
Before visiting the site, we had already visited two sections of Ed 140 - The Art of Making Meaning: Educational Perspectives on Literacy and Learning in a Global World. Both sections were focused on the same material and presented it largely similar ways with corresponding slides but with distinctive renderings of the material by the GSIs leading the sections. The topic of the day was “Language and Identity” and focused on analyzing the work of Bakhtin and discussing it in relation to readings by Richard Rodriguez and Gloria Anzaldua. Students discussed the material in both full class and small groups and interwove their understandings of the readings with both their own personal experiences and their shared experiences with children in the after-school settings where they worked.
UC Berkeley: St.Cornelius ECUC Expanded Learning Program
General Observations
The St. Cornelius ECUC Expanded Learning Program provides a range of after-school activities for K-8th grade children, five days a week from 3-6pm, as well as some days during the holiday breaks. Activities include time for check-in and snack, physical activities on the school playgrounds, an array of informal enrichment activities ranging from Space2Create digital storytelling to STEM activities with Legos, and personalized learning/homework time. Approximately 75 students participate in the after-school program, representing more than half of the overall school enrollment, of which ninety-eight percent of the students receive tuition assistance.
Focused Observations
We observed on two of the many activities in which students were participating on the Tuesday we visited:
Space2Cre8 (S2C8) - 7th and 8th grade students
S2C8 participants create digital stories about their own histories, experiences and personal reflections, which they sometimes share with youth in other local and international settings. UC Berkeley staff and graduate students working with Professor Hull bring a wide array of technology to the school each week and work with groups of students to help them build more comprehensive understandings of story construction and filmmaking, develop literacies for communicating with their global peers, and create stories with the latest technology, such as 3-D Virtual Reality.
About 15 students organized into three groups took part in various stages of the video production process. One group was developing a storyboard for their video, and successfully prepared and practiced the texts and recorded the intro and outro to their project. A second group was recording some final scenes for their project, and a third group was reviewing and editing video that they had previously recorded.
Lego Zip Line - 5th and 6th grade students
Mr. Greg, the Expanded Learning Director, facilitated an activity where groups of students were given lego pieces and they could build a structure that would hang on a zipline and travel across the classroom. Approximately 20 students worked in groups of three to four students, each building their own structure. As groups finished, they brought their structures to Mr. Greg. The first person who finished building their structure, worked with Mr. Greg to set-up and test sending the structure down the zipline. The line sagged, it came loose from the wall, and a number of other challenges presented themselves that Mr. Greg used as opportunities for the students to problem solve and help solve and improve both the zipline and the design of the lego structures.
Reflections
Professor Hull’s programs have been collaborating with various 21st CCLC partners for close to 20 years and with the current four schools for the last 10 years. There seems to be a seamless integration of the S2C8 activities within the larger structure of the expanded learning program and undergraduates can choose to participate in any of the after-school activities. This model is different from many of the programs that we see around the state, where UC Links activities are one part of a larger after school program but may or may not be seamlessly integrated within the larger expanded after school structures that have been established by their schools. Coordinating with the larger program can sometimes be challenging or problematic as programs work to align with or fit-in to already existing (and ever evolving) structures, but the St. Cornelius program seems to have achieved that alignment through long-term, practice-oriented discussions between school staff and the university staff associated with ECUC.
ECUC has had remarkable success in integrating activities, for example working collaboratively with the Heads of School and Expanded Learning Directors to transform the way the program approached homework help. Instead of an hour of “drill-and-kill” worksheets at the beginning of the program, students now engage in “Personalized Learning” that includes homework, reading, and other relevant activities linking school and after school in a seamless strand of learning activities.
Over their long collaboration, the practices that support the seamless integration have evolved. Some of these successful practices include:
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Authentic collaboration from the beginning - including the co-development and co-authorship of the 21st CCLC proposal to secure and maintain funding and the ongoing co-development of expanded learning activities at each school
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Sufficient staffing, including a University-Community Liaison who coordinates all of the programs by engaging the university staff and students together with the Expanded Learning Directors at each school site
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Convening monthly meetings among all Expanded Learning Directors, Heads of School, and the University-Community Liaison
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Ongoing professional development for Expanded Learning Directors provided by the University-Community Liaison and other Cal staff as necessary/relevant
Our visit to the St. Cornelius site showed how the undergraduate course and the after school activities are intricately linked such that each informs the other. Our thanks to Glynda and her team for making our visit so instructive and enjoyable.