 So I want to say a little bit about the inspiration for being here today. So it really comes from many places, but two places primarily. So Marty and I edited this volume that came out in January. And it's the title of our symposium today, as well as the title of the book. And it's contributed as well, this year. Yes, we have contributors that are here. And it was one of the reasons that we wanted to begin to have this conversation. But in this particular place today, it's about our local partnerships. Because if one driver for this and one inspiration was the book itself, the other is the 10 plus years of work that we've been collaborating with. That there's these rich partnerships, community partnerships, partnerships with faculty, with students, with activists, with community members in Latinx community. So we wanted to kind of, when we brought this home here to UMass and did this presentation, we wanted to focus on what's happening here. So the presentations today are really in the Holyoke and Springfield and the region. What are we doing in terms of this kind of civic engagement in diverse Latinx communities and learning from social justice partnerships in action? It says a lot about the frameworks that we're going to be using today in our conversations and presentations and dialogues. And then the last thing I just wanted to mention that, again, being in an academic context, oftentimes these kinds of partnerships are not seen as knowledge production and we want to argue that they are. They're new forms of understanding, new forms of theorizing, new forms of developing, new practices and knowledge about what's happening in these communities and how it's also challenging these institutions that oftentimes are, again, very heteronormative, also very Western, that don't necessarily bring into communities of color into those conversations. And so we really want to try to challenge that and say, no, there's actually really amazing and critical work that's taking place that is really also, again, formulating new forms of understanding that's important to document and recognize which the book attempted to do with various different partnerships across the country, all written by Latinx-identified faculty from Variety, Chicano, Dominicana, Puerto Ricanos, Mexicanos, but also in terms of the communities themselves that are pan-Latino and multi-ethnic as well and multi-racial. So that's an important piece. And so that's the other sort of impetus for trying to both do the book but also bring all our collaborators and friends together. So without further ado, we're gonna move to the first panel. Okay, so our first panel is called Building Partnerships for Community Learning. And the panelists will discuss two innovative partnerships that have developed to support community-engaged learning, culturally-sustaining pedagogies and local capacity-building. The partnerships are UMass Amherst College of Education Collaboration with the Holyoke Public Schools Ethnic Studies Program, which we'll hear from first. And then the Holyoke Community College's Collaboration with the Planting Literacy Project at Holyoke-Chicapee Springfield Head Start. Thanks. Thanks. I'm sitting here and I'm feeling a mix of excitement and nerves. I feel like my heart's gonna explode. And while Madi and Joseph were talking, I had a flashback to an episode of Family Ties where Alex P. Keen just froze when he realized that he was being filmed. So I looked up and I was like, I hope that doesn't happen. All right, so now that we've got that out of the way, my name is Dana Altshuler and I work in Holyoke Public Schools and I'm in the role of Ethnic Studies Coordinator. Thank you, Madi and Joseph, for inviting us to be on this panel. And today we're gonna speak about a community partnership between UMass and Holyoke Public Schools and I'm gonna do a lot of reading because I'm super nervous. Before we're locating to Holyoke Public Schools, I was coming from San Francisco and teaching in SFUSD where at the time, myself along with a small group of teachers were invited to be part of an Ethnic Studies Collaborative. Working closely with a professor from San Francisco State University to develop Ethnic Studies Curriculum to then pilot in five schools across the city. Our students, a monopoly of cultures representing African American, Latinx and Asian Pacific Island communities became the intentional center of the Ethnic Studies Curriculum in the context of San Francisco. Through this transformative work, I had seen firsthand students engaging with an Ethnic Studies Curriculum that centered their identities, communities and experiences. So I'm coming to Holyoke Public Schools, I can never go back to any, quote, traditional way of being in the classroom because through Ethnic Studies for the first time in my life as a white educator in the public school system, I was able to see clearly that what we really mean by upholding, quote, traditional curriculum and practice is to partake in the project of sustaining white supremacy. In Holyoke today and five years ago, this idea still seems so radical and offensive to many of my colleagues, which makes Ethnic Studies all the more relevant in this context. And so our curriculum in Holyoke Public Schools seeks to bring the histories of Puerto Rican people living in the diaspora out of the margins and into the center. Ethnic Studies is part of a larger project to expose and dismantle white supremacy. Ethnic Studies gives language so that students can name inequity to transform. Ethnic Studies helps us to imagine new ways of being in a world otherwise dictated by colonialism, capitalism and racism. Ethnic Studies gives permission to educators to love their students, to hug their students, to connect with students in ways that contradict, quote, traditional relationships in our schools. All of this to say, Ethnic Studies is critical in Holyoke Public Schools. In 2016, I was introduced to a UMass professor from the social justice education program, Antonio Martinez. He became a quick mentor supporting the work of Ethnic Studies in Holyoke Public Schools. And through him, I was introduced to Joelle Orsay. Joelle has become a brother in this work, picking up where Antonio left off, continuing to push this work beyond the four walls of the classroom and into the community. In the past year, Joelle and I have worked with intention to reject the studies in Holyoke Public Schools to UMass with a particular focus on dual enrollment, college access and teacher professional development. And that's what we're here to talk to you guys about today. I just want to quickly take you through some of the slides that we have here that show the trajectory of the academic programming of Holyoke Public Schools from 2013 to the present, starting with an eighth grade curriculum. It was my eighth grade Ethnic Studies English class where we piloted some Ethnic Studies curriculum. It was received well by students. And then by 2014, we spread to two other classrooms. We left the English and we went into social studies classrooms by 2015-16. What does it say there? Eighth grade, thank you. All eighth grade social studies classrooms across the district. We're now teaching an eighth grade Ethnic Studies curriculum. 2016-17, we moved to the high school ninth grade and we also spread to the seventh grade. And so here we are in 2018-19 school year. We have Ethnic Studies in our seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th grade classrooms. This will be piloting our first dual enrollment class in collaboration with Westfield State. So thank you Wilma for connecting us. And so there's a lot of work happening. We have about 1,000 students enrolled in Ethnic Studies classes in Holyoke Public Schools right now. I think there's one other slide. So just a quick comment about our curriculum. Some of our anchoring questions that we've across the seventh and to 11th grade curriculum in the next year, the 12th grade will roll out. Due to the themes of causality, solidarity, resistance, and action. And so one of the first questions we are working on with students is how did systems of power and oppression become institutionalized in the United States and how are these systems upheld over time? In regards to solidarity, in what ways are people of color and marginalized groups both in the U.S. and abroad impacted by a legacy of colonization? In regards to resistance, what have people of color and marginalized groups and young folks done to organize movements that challenge the status quo? And then making it local in regards to action? What action can Holyoke High students plan, organize, and implement to resist systemic oppression in our own city and schools? Thank you. Hi, morning everyone. Good morning. So I'm, thank you Dana, for just setting the context for the conversation this morning. Where I wanna pick up off of is two years ago in the 2016, 2017 school year and the introduction that led to the, kind of the fostering of this partnership that we have today. And thank you for naming Antonio, because that was central. And so was Jerica as well, who was the original program director of the restorative justice program over at Holyoke High School. And you know, I think it's important to name those folks, because I think it's through that, that led to this collaboration that you see here today. And so it's this mixture of, I think I would call it, like maybe some like organic relationship building that happened there, but also just like a willingness on the behalf of the program to bring folks into the fold because of our mutual connections, but also because of our mutual interests. I have to say that when I came in in 2015, as a doctoral student, to UMass, I didn't walk in with specific intentions to engage in work related to ethnic studies at the school level, but it made sense for me to do this work and engage in this kind of work in a local school context because of my, just of my prior interest in political education and social movements. But through the initial meetings that we had back in 2015, back in 2016, I'm sorry, we had an opportunity to just kind of connect and through that, and I also had the opportunity to meet the ninth grade teacher that was implementing the pilot, the pilot curriculum for the ninth graders that were just about to begin the first inaugural year of ethnic studies over at Holyokei. So that led to me kind of being able to have the opportunity to go into the classroom and personally for me, and after a year in the program, I was a little thankful to be able to have the opportunity to go back into the classroom. For me, it was to see ethnic studies being pushed in a predominantly Puerto Rican community and to see that happening was, it moved me in a particular way and just also the opportunity to work with young people. Not to mention the fact that getting a brisk reminder of how early the school day starts and then came back to my teaching days, that was a quick reminder. But I really did appreciate the opportunity to just be in there and see it happening and being able to kind of work alongside students in an informal way. But by the end of the school year and later on in the school year, Dana had asked me to get some student input and feedback to hopefully inform the program in the curriculum. So eventually I got the opportunity to do some interviews with several students who took that class to kind of corroborate some of my informal observations there. As we went into the next following year in 2017, 2018, I would say that's where we really, really picked up our conversations and collaboration with it focusing a lot on how this can be, I'm gonna say a mutually beneficial collaboration and that was, I would say, was a central topic of most of our conversations. I think it guided us, I wouldn't say it was central, but it guided our conversations throughout the entire year and I meant through the entire year as well, it wasn't just this one off. But my interests in aligning my research as a doctoral student with supporting the program and reflecting on what was, that was just obvious that I wanted to align my research in terms of supporting the program. And for Dana, from what I took away from our conversations, it was an interest to see how UMass and my personal interest could push the program through its support and through its research. So that's kind of what set the context for the beginning of the school year. One of the main takeaways from those student reflections that I talked about that happened at the end of their first inaugural year was this need for more intentional curriculum that's reflective of local context. And for students to see a lot more of a fluid link between their local context and the ethnic studies curriculum, both on a historical tip but then also just at a present day level as well. So that was something that we really wanted to strive toward and make that a little bit more fluid and intentional in the curriculum. Before I get to this, before I talk about this part, I think it's important to note that prior to me even, prior to us even like starting our collaboration, Dana had started to develop some of those, had done some of that outreach prior and been able to start those conversations with quite frankly with some of the folks that are in this room right now. So thinking of like Wilma Flores over at Westfield, Janetta, Maria, also over thinking about like Johann over at the Gandara after school program, the media literacy program. So that was stuff that was already kind of starting to happen but I think what was significant about that year is that we were looking to expand that and make community engagement a central component to the curriculum. So essentially what we were talking about, what I think we were talking about was capacity building for community engagement. So how do we get to the point where this is a sustainable and central part of the program? On my end, thinking of how I could support that, I think it was mostly about relationship building with higher ed staff and faculty, which in my mind was definitely about leveraging my position as a doctoral student. I think that's something that as graduate students being in an institution like this or whatever institution that we're at, I think that's something that should be in the forefront of our mind of how are we leveraging our positionality and thinking about like what do we have access to? But also just trying to build relationships with like local community based organizations in the area. And I saw this as like a precursor to implementing like this vision for community engaged learning and for social justice for the program. I'm gonna highlight just the program just as a visual representation of kind of some of the partnerships. I know some of the lettering might be small. Something we'll figure out kind of how to make the visual pop out a little bit more. But I think what we're trying to just point out here is just the different types of partnerships that have been happening here and what it looked like in 2017 with again the main goal being building capacity for future programming, but still allowing students who are currently in the program to still have learning experiences that's both engaged in community based learning but also kind of giving access to local higher ed institutions. So this looked like field experiences that we started last school year where we got an opportunity to kind of build relationships and introduce students to local organizations like Nuestras Amas, Nuestras Raíces, Nueva Esperanza continuing with Gandara and in LASA as well in terms of, I think on a exposure level, but also for the program to start building that relationship. And also just continuing to think about like how can we again leverage these partnerships with higher ed institutions. So that looked like working with Westfield, with UMass, with ACC continuing to do that, but that's what it looked like in the last school year and again this is something that we're gonna continue to build on. I'm gonna end on just talking about kind of a little bit more of the alignment in terms of just like the research and thinking about how it can support a program. I think what I was thinking about was how do we channel this capacity building for a critical research agenda and that's what I would call it, a critical research agenda. That's mutually beneficial but that's also about producing knowledge outside of university silos and I think that happens a lot. I think it's a comfort zone for a lot of folks and I've noticed that and I think for me it's also easy to just continue to do that and fall into that little silos where it's just happening there. So a lot of the conversations and it was a lot of conversations that we had about that conversation of how do we build this in which it's a visually beneficial collaboration but it's also how do we move towards a consensus and a way that we see it pushing the program. A lot of the conversations really built off of each other so I'll give just one example. We started some conversations about college access programs and dual enrollment but then that immediately, not immediately but as the year progressed it became a conversation about how do we do college access programming and then you had Dr. Mawangi come in, I'm along with me and another graduate student to do some after school programming work so just I think the willingness to understand that conversations can go in different directions here. I want to pass it along to Lauda and I'm gonna go back to the other side so that Lauda can speak on one of the partnerships that also kind of developed from these conversations which is the capacity building but on the level of teachers and thinking about how can teachers support this community engaged learning and Lauda's gonna speak a little bit about that. Thank you. In the sake of time I think I will actually focus on the significance of the partnership for myself as an academic. I would like to acknowledge that I am here thanks to the collaboration with my colleagues Kisha Green and Kaisa Ny Green aside from the team members here. The ideas of this presentation are enriched by our collaboration or work together. However, this presentation right now offers my own perspective. As academic in this partnership with the ethnic studies program at Holyoke today I present to you a little glimpse of what the partnership means to me as an academic. I'll begin by stating that engagement and partnerships constitute intense experiences for those involved. So that's a given. This is particularly true for academics like myself and my colleagues who bring expertise and commitments concerning critical issues of academic authority, power differentials and social justice. Our work on the field allows us the opportunity to test ideas but also to challenge theory and transform our own understandings and practice. In general as academics we have been mainly socialized as experts who bring their contributions in the forms of ideas to others in academia and outside academia. There is a great deal of this work that takes place on paper via our own publications. However, partnerships take place in a different dimension especially for the academic whose work is about contesting power in order to build social justice. Partnerships are necessarily the experience by which we become vulnerable. With a clarification that this vulnerability is not generated by any sort of masochism it's not like we want to be vulnerable if I can use the term but the conviction that with partnerships critical academics enters space where they ought to embody not only intentions but also actions. Their actions should defy power differentials towards the construction of genuine democratic participatory socially just relationships. If we are not willing to become vulnerable and we don't hold such conviction then partnerships may be the wrong place for us. Therefore it is important to understand that as partners academics are essentially learners. For me being part of this project on youth center professional development for ethnic studies teachers in Holyoke involved going through the experience of making mistakes even with good intentions with experience of feeling rushed and subjected to institutional deadlines all at the same time. My process to become part of the present project began by inviting different academic partners in order to put together a grand proposal to work with the Holyoke High School ethnic studies program without being able to fully involve the school in the design of the proposal. Although the proposal sounded good on paper and it proposed a coherent vision of my academic view it did not represent the ethnic studies programs made purposes and needs. From the academic point of view in a world where we are rewarded for a grand proposal submission it did not matter if the grand proposal matched the actual needs or plans of the potential partner. In the world of partnerships this match mattered above all. What can we do when we incur in such mistakes? Luckily in my case my future partner was willing to talk even after the proposal was submitted and one of our colleagues now here initiated a communication with invited me to talk with my future partner Dana. And of course I was eager to have that conversation it was much needed. And this story gets even brighter because the conversation with my potential partner following a mistake was about drawing boundaries, acknowledging mistakes of course understanding and repairing. And also this conversation allowed us to generate new ideas. So when we came across a second opportunity for a grand proposal we as partners now were ready to prepare an excellent proposal together. So our story is far from over but let me go back to the idea of vulnerability. It's an idea but it's also action. The action of becoming vulnerable may be a challenge for us academics but when it comes to rewards I can say that becoming vulnerable for the academic dedicated to partnerships in social justice can be exceptionally rewarding. That's all. Thank you. Good morning everyone and we are standing because my nurse has to go for my feeds because you know this is not working. As you can see there in the picture that is one of our classrooms our slogan is educating parents to educate their children. And this is Planting Ita C program that we have with this magic guy and I will explain that the first thing that I want to say is thank you to the angel to these migrant community mothers. It's Raul Gutierrez the person that is doing incredible, incredible job. Everybody knows what is Head Start but probably not everybody know that Head Start have a migrant program that is called Migrant and Seasonal Program we offer we start since 2005 and we have run for 125 children whose parents work in agriculture. Our children start and that is probably another information that not everybody knows our children start since one month old that young until of course five years old. Their service is the service that we provide to these families is since five in the morning to five in the afternoon and that is neat because these farmer workers were really long hours probably you know. And this is of course covering the need the big need that this parent has. A Head Start doesn't only offer education for the children if not we try to cover every single need in the families. Sometimes not directly Head Start but we use a lot of partnerships with different communities and they are helping us to cover the needs. 90% of our parents or community are from Guatemala. They are almost all of them undocumented and many of them came to the country probably my older family is 15 years in the country and almost all of them came from the desert. Parents are undocumented and educated. They have only just a short experience in school. They probably received no more than two years in the school and actually some of them received education in a dialect. So you cannot believe this but some of the families came to United States speaking in a dialect and they learn how to speak Spanish in United States. It's difficult for children to get a Head Start at home when parents are uneducated. We use different assessments and surveys to know about their needs. And that is how we know when we are doing an irregular intake how we know that these parents need to learn how to read and write and first in the experts you probably as many of the professors and teachers here experts say that to dominate your second language you have to dominate your original language and we are talking about that these people has probably an a dialect also. So that is how we start this program. Dianiseal Survey give the numbers to see how many of these people is needed. We start recruiting more families and we are looking for support about who can fund us and we find Community Foundation in the first year we started in 2015. Community Foundation was at the initial start. We started with around 25 parents. We provide a lot of logistics like a transportation for these parents because you know that these parents doesn't have transportation. And some of them do, but don't tell anybody. They have to write with our license and there's more dangers. That's another project that one date we will start. We are offering a class that is 90 minutes. They receive a dinner in the beginning. They have a half hour for the dinner because they are coming straight from work and they are really hungry. So they really enjoy the first dinner and be ready with some candies because that make you a lot of energy for receive that class. I know I made sure that always say it's a cake or chocolate there. Yeah. Yeah. We offer transportation. We offer the dinner. We offer childcare because they cannot leave the children at home. So we offer the childcare too. In the beginning we start in 2015 we start with Spanish classes. That was the beginning. But we advance pretty quick. We probably later talk about what are the challenges are but pretty quick in the second year we include ESL as a basic. So we continue with something that we call transition to ESL that was kind of dual language. That's Raul instructor for that class. And we have another retired professor I think that is doing an ESL class. Attendance is always really important. And the reason is because we have to make sure that these students first learn how to be a student again and second is they are really tired but we have to make sure that they attend the class. That is the clue and everybody and the students know more about that. Usually we do and then of the year evaluation or assessments that permit us to know how much they advance and how different we have to work in the next step. So Raul. So when we started the program we started with Spanish. So I'm trained as a foreign language teacher. So the issue that we ran into it was the levels and we had some other parents that didn't even speak any Spanish at all. So what we were trying to do was anchoring the goals, the academic goals for the students and the planting literacy and the goals for the volunteer slash Latinx studies which didn't exist. It still doesn't exist. It's in curriculum right now. So where did I find my students were in my Spanish classes slash the Lisa Club which is the Latino study, the Latino club at HCC. So how do you do that? So we did exploration. The students would do the planting literacy students would do self practice, self advocacy with the goal as the major goal and in return our students would get the ability to self advocate for themselves also. An organic committee engagement. A lot of the students that I had I did have a DACA student that was participated this until she's a part now. So I'm really happy for her. So and she participated throughout the whole project and it was creating cultural community for our students when they go out into the field. Understanding that even though maybe they're different and so on and so forth and we made sure to create community because we had dinner with our students. We would sit and we wouldn't call them students even though you want it for me. But we would sit together, have dinner together and then after that we would have class. The woman that she's mentioning is a 77 year old woman that's taking Spanish classes for five like this since I was hired and she keeps taking them over and over again. She's in my Latino lit class now. So and I keep telling Doralik and she was an ESL teacher and she's retired so she was at it. And so cultural awareness for the students regarding rights especially in the era of Trump now. We were not in the era of Trump back then but we create this sense of understanding what are your rights within the framework of the instruction. Cultural awareness for our students and our goal in connection to this was creating a Latinx studies curriculum at HCC. I don't know if you know if you're aware but HCC is a Hispanic serving institution. We have that means that we're over 25% of our population is Latino, majority Puerto Rican obviously. So we're trying to create something that it's representative of their knowledge, of their understanding of the world. So and the main goal for the land planting literacy I'm rushing because we have a video. So as teacher, the parents becoming their primary teachers and self-advocating for themselves and their children. So, also I wanted, we have other partnerships that are really successful. So we had partnerships and I want to thank Laura Baldeviso because she did help at the start of this project because I'm not in education or education. So I asked her, do you think this might work? And she actually provided feedback and was really helpful. So we wrote a grant which was the Bridging Cultures Grant Latino Studies in the US that began in 2015. And it was created to train our faculty members from different disciplines regarding Latino studies and we were lucky to have great facilitators, Mari, Joe, Pineda. And I want to thank Dr. Jonathan Rosa, he's no longer here in Stanford that helped us write the grant and lead and Dr. Luis Marentes, which he also helped in the Spanish department with us. So we created the creation of the Latinx program, straightens the relationship with our, one of our main transfer institutions, which is UMass, and also straightens in the relationship with our Latino community surrounding. Because sometimes at ATC we have, we're in the hills, we're up there, and sometimes our students don't feel welcome when they get there. And so we're just trying to create, put the community back in community college. So, and as a result of the grant, we were able to create really fruitful relationships with the Holyoke Public Library, especially with Aline Crosby, the archivist. So we create, we've been doing service learning component in my classes, for example, Nostros Enderos, we've been translating some of the data that she collected. And also I've been part of the committee of Saberes Poder, resources of Puerto Rican Latinx history, which culture and social movements, which is basically creating this repository of knowledge for the community members in Holyoke, for them to be able to check out books about their own history. So, where are we now? This is going through curriculum next week. It's already been approved. This is our Latinx studies at ATC. And it's basically, we are requiring a capstone civic engagement project, or a whole semester of civic engagement for all our students that take this. And we wanna create a pipeline, possibly from our schools in Holyoke and the schools everywhere. Cause I would say Holyoke and they're like, what about someone from where? And I said, well, they're welcome. Come on down. We want you all. And create a pathway from there to there, continuing to work within the community, it be it with the Watermelon Mothers that I'm not their hero, they're my hero, cause they do everything, I just show off. So, but, and it's creating this sense and our next step is creating a pathway for them. Where do they go after ATC? If they decide to get associates in this. So, if anyone is interested, and I'm like recruiting people, just talk to me. So, but we have, this is gonna start on fall 2019 if everything goes well. So it's, again, it's really important for us to have moments of dialogues with each other. And so we're actually gonna combine the Q and A with the dialogue. So we actually want folks to be in dialogue together, but to also come up with questions that then we're gonna be asking the panelists later on. We're also gonna be posting, if you see little post-it notes in the middle of your tables, that's where both the questions will be asked, but also responses to the question that we're gonna be asking, which is what are the challenges and successes? Have you had an engaging and linking academic and non-academic community partners, students and social movements, perhaps in the work that you've been doing? So what are the both the challenges and successes that you all have experienced? So we're gonna do that for about 10 minutes. And then we're gonna move on, we're gonna, we may have time at the end for just a really quick questions and we're gonna have a quick break. Alrighty, so folks can, well we're gonna do that right now. So folks can start engaging with each other at the table. Introduce yourselves to each other, please, if you don't know each other. And we also wanna invite the panelists to actually join some of the tables as well, so that if the questions do get asked and spread out. So don't go to the same table.