Welcome to the conversation garden! cultivating learning communities, critical práxis, and asset-based thinking
Creators: name: Feldman, Marina
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: While universities’ interest in community engagement has grown over time in the United States, the public pedagogies set forth by them do not always reflect a commitment to sustaining community-engaged learning. Additionally, commitments sometimes demonstrate mindsets and the language of “helping” the community or “fixing” a problem – deficit-based approaches, as opposed to the mindset that university stakeholders are there to learn with and from community members and organizations. This dissertation analyzes the experiences of 15 undergraduate students from primarily immigrant backgrounds in a community-engaged language learning partnership program grounded in asset-based and power-cognizant práxis. It also examines what their community-engaged instructor, the author, learned with and from them. The students and instructor collaborated over the year to facilitate an English-focused program grounded on conversation, social interaction, and community building. The Conversation Garden has been a successful community-engaged program for more than a decade, sustaining old partnerships and building new ones over time, despite a lack of sustained institutional support. The program facilitates opportunities for immigrant adults to practice English through conversation with university students, who in turn learn with and from those adults and their rich cultural and linguistic repertoires. Particularly, this dissertation centers on the longstanding partnership with a worker center that serves majorly Latin American immigrant workers, educating and advocating to amplify workers’ voices and fight for social justice across the state. This dissertation reports on a yearlong práxis developed with students, and in dialogue with community members and this community partner, drawing on a power-cognizant, multi-directional, asset-based approach to community-engaged learning. Through a methodology called dialogic (auto)ethnographic pedagogy, it explores how students made sense of their experiences and learning with and from local immigrant community members and organizations, and in collaborative dialogue with their peers and instructors. This study asks: How do students in a community-engaged, language-focused program make sense of their experiences and learning with and from local immigrant community members and organizations? This question is answered through an analysis that centers around 1) social interactions and relationships; 2) funds of knowledge and funds of identity; and 3) power-informed social critiques and agency, with an emphasis on students from immigrant backgrounds. Asset-based approaches orient this program, along with a critical Freirian pedagogy of ongoing reflection and practice, informed by theories and práxis, grounded within our own situated knowledges. In the program, students were welcomed into classroom learning communities in ways that acknowledged their whole selves and engaged with parts of their background and knowledge as key sources for theorizing. Through a critical, reflexive práxis, students learned to identify and leverage strengths in immigrant communities, and to situate community challenges within an understanding of social structures. At the same time, they were identifying and leveraging their own assets and challenges, striving to become better conversation facilitators, while also theorizing their experience and how it will impact their future societal roles. Hence, while this dissertation explores students learning about the strengths and challenges of immigrant communities, it dives into how this práxis facilitated learning about their own selves, backgrounds, identities, and agency. This work highlights reflexive dimensions of learning in community, as students and the author learned about themselves – their identities, orientations, and aspirations for social change – by engaging, reflecting, and theorizing with others. This work contributes to the literature on community-engaged learning partnerships, reinforcing the importance of co-producing place-based, power-cognizant, reflexive knowledge in our work with immigrant, or otherwise minoritized, communities within and beyond our campuses. It also contributes to the understanding of how students learn in community-engaged programs, highlighting relationships, community, and social interactions as pedagogical tools as well as outcomes.