Amplifying Voices: A Digital Storytelling Partnership

Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, California State University’s Digital Ethnic Futures Initiative (DEFCon) and the UCLA Center for Community Schooling partnered to create an eight-month training and development series on Digital Storytelling for three teams of Community School (CS) Fellows. These fellows represent deep-dive transformation sites in Anaheim, Shasta, and West Contra Costa, CA. The objective of this partnership was to engage CS Fellows in hands-on workshops and mentoring sessions, empowering them to develop digital assets that effectively shared their stories, insights, lessons, and legacies from community schooling.

By amplifying the voices of students, parents, and CS administrators, this collaboration strengthens both the CS Fellows program and the Center for Community Schooling’s commitment to advancing community schools strategies. Additionally, it aligns with CSUF DEFCon’s mission to cultivate the next generation of social justice-engaged digital scholars who will work alongside community organizations to increase access to digital tools and technologies. In pursuit of Digital Ethnic Futures, these stories amplify the voices and experiences of underrepresented events, histories, cultural practices, and people in the U.S. and beyond.

The storytelling website here and the stories it carries are a product of this collaboration, under the guidance of Dr. Leyda Garcia and a team of educators and researchers at the UCLA Center for Community Schooling, along with Dr. Jamila Moore Pewu and Scherly Virgill from CSUF’s Digital Ethnic Futures Initiative. Auut Studio, a design firm dedicated to social justice, provided support for the web design and development.

California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) is an initiative of the California Department of Education that is designed to accelerate efforts across the state to reimagine schools as empowering, racially-just, relationship-centered spaces where all students thrive – which is the essential concept of community schools.

The CCSPP came about in July 2021 when the California State Legislature passed the California Community Schools Partnership Act in response to grassroots advocacy and organizing.  In 2022, the legislature allocated additional funds and extended the program through 2031, bringing the total of this historic investment to $4.1 billion. To ensure the success of schools in the grant program, it established a series of Technical Assistance Centers — there are 8 regional centers (“R-TACs”) as well as a lead center called the State Transformational Assistance Center (“S-TAC”). Currently, this S-TAC is operated by the Alameda County Office of Education in a partnership with three supporting organizations of education professionals:

• UCLA Center for Community Schooling,
• National Education Association (NEA), and
• Californians for Justice (CFJ)

Find your Regional TAC ›
Learn more at scs.gseis.ucla.edu ›
‍Official page at CA Dept of Education ›

The UCLA Center for Community Schooling is a campus-wide initiative to advance university-assisted community schools. As stable anchor institutions, universities play a unique role as K-12 community school partners. Our research, teaching, and service missions inform and are informed by the work of local schools and communities. In partnership, we are poised to disrupt historical inequalities and reimagine schooling as a public good that prepares all students to succeed in college, careers, and civic life.

The Center publishes both a monthly newsletter and an open-access, online multimedia journal called Community Schooling, where each issue centers around four main features: a School Case study, a highlight on Teacher scholarship, as well as new research by Youth, plus Policy Actions & Briefs. 

Learn more at communityschooling.gseis.ucla.edu ›

The national Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) — made up of professionals engaged in digital humanities research, teaching, and ethnic studies — was established in 2021 with a capacity-building grant from the Andrew A. Mellon Foundation. For the past three years, the DEFCon team operating at California State University-Fullerton have been cultivating and training the next generation of Digital Humanities practitioners from amongst CSUF’s faculty and staff, with the expectation that they will craft innovative research and pedagogical experiences that center first-generation and minority students along with the communities they call home.

Learn more at csufdigital.org ›

The Stuart Foundation is committed to supporting meaningful learning opportunities for California’s adolescents, while strengthening an equitable school system that supports them.

Throughout its history, the Foundation has understood that adolescent learning and development extends beyond academics, and believes that the public schools that serve youth underpin vibrant communities, inclusive economies, and a functioning democracy. These interconnected commitments – to helping adolescents thrive, to equity and to public education – guide the Foundation’s support of robust, just and well-resourced schools that value every young person.

Learn more at stuartfoundation.org ›