Corre la Voz Afterschool

CLV is a teaching-learning “lab” because we are cultivating a better future…by innovating, tinkering, challenging, and studying better ways of working together

two boys and two mentors work on a bright orange Mac laptop. One of the mentors is standing behind them. All of the faces are intent. One of the boys is scratching his head. To the side, another woman works on a bright turquoise Mac laptop.
  • CLV develops and studies intergenerational, mutually supportive “ecologies” of learning that are:
  • community-based: dedicated to building inclusive learning communities, and to working in partnership;
  • activity-based: using innovative, multimodal, and hands-on approaches, using games, projects, technology, and movement;
  • inquiry-based: open-minded, curious, and interested in hearing and listening from everyone’s perspectives, backgrounds, and feelings;
  • about creating new opportunities: we support academic, research, and professional pathways especially for first-generation students and faculty

…I think something that CLV has that no other program emphasized was the social-emotional wellbeing of the students.”

CLV UCSC Alum
2014-2016
and
Assistant Coordinator of After-School Program in Los Angeles

a young student with long dark hair in a bright yellow hoodie sweatshirt is taking a picture of the photographer using a red point and shoot digital camera, on a school playground.
a male mentor is seated on carpet, surrounded by two boys. He passes a ball of yarn to one of them.

CLV is about world-building, a day at a time

a view in of a youth holding a small ball up, ready to throw it
program schedule
HOW DO I ENROLL?
program principles
how do we study “engagement?”

A pop-up home-room

Corre la Voz is a “pop-up” program.

CLV arrives at the school just before 3:00 p.m., and starts setting up and greeting kids. We use the space that’s available–sometimes the library or a loaned classroom.

We are able to be at the school thanks to our coordination with regular Afterschool Staff, the office staff, custodians, counselors, librarians, and the hardworking teachers still in their classrooms. Mentors, please reach out and say hi! This is an opportunity for professional development, as well as community-building.

In Winter-Spring 2025, CLV will be part of a Participatory Action Research project to sustain and expand campus and community capacity for culturally relevant afterschool spaces. (Learn more.)

a group of university mentors in jackets, sweatshirts, and ID lanyards stand in a group on the playground.

2024-25 Program Schedule

This year, CLV will be offered in Winter and Spring of 2025.

Program dates on site:
January 17-March 6; April 17-May 22

Schedule:
THURSDAYS 3:00-5:30pm

Typical Daily Program:
3:00 The Power of the Word / Poder de la Palabra
3:35 Dinámica! / Game-based learning.
4:10 Project Time / Proyectos

END OF YEAR: FAMILY NIGHT CELEBRATION

Corre la Voz logo. Colorful letters spell CLV next to a microphone. Below it reads, Corre la Voz!

Program Principles & Guidelines

Our program can get very busy, with a lot of moving people and moving pieces! We encourage creativity and flexibility as mentors work with their students and gain confidence as leaders and activity facilitators.

We are always learning to work with new team members, always unlearning old thinking and practices, and always looking for better ways to shift power. We need to be intentionally present, and thoughtful in our communication.

Our student leaders worked over years to develop some principles to help ground us and make decisions together. The summary version of these is:

  1. Respect is the deepest root.
  2. Ask for help. Model asking.
  3. Growth & resilience, not “perfection.”
  4. Self-care & community care.
  5. Be there for the kids.
  6. Team solidarity is community strength. Check with the team; communicate. Keep agreements.
  7. Step up for safety; refer.

Co-Leadership Skills

In CLV, we learn concepts and practices of constructive, collaborative power:

  • how to create and hold space with others;
  • how to defend group rights to learn;
  • how to plan and facilitate activities and develop projects;
  • how to give constructive feedback, ask productive questions, model steps, and uplift others;
  • how to use “time as a tool;”
  • how to call time-out and ask for help
3 undergraduate mentors lead a classroom activity using a playground ball.
We teach & learn in community & through games
a male mentor listens as a boy talks. There are papers on the table.
An older man wearing a ball cap is seated outside in front of a planter box full of flowers, next to a youth holding a microphone
a university mentor holds a hula hoop up in an indoor game while one student ducks through it and others smile and laugh
Two young women sit side by side next to a panel reading CLV Senderos

“This was a really positive experience for me because it made me realize what kind of path I wanted to take, because before Corre La Voz I didn’t really know what I was going to do after college.”

CLV Alum 2011-12

Elementary School Teacher, Central Valley

a boy works to explain his writing and thinking while a mentor listens
Mentors learn about learning when kids explain what they’re thinking

“I understood that I needed to take ownership of my own education and lead by example.”

UCSC CLV Alum

a mentor in a blue LA Dodgers cap helps a young boy with computer movie edits

Pedagogies & Research Opportunities

Community-based

In CLV, our approach starts with building relationships, trust, and a participatory space that recognizes each person’s identity and contribution.

CLV exists because of long-standing partnerships and relationships with families, school staff, and organizations, as well as campus supporters. (Learn more.)

Activities and pedagogies are collaborative, intergenerational, mutually supportive and dynamic. We all learn from each other.

Mentors work alongside graduate students, faculty, and school staff as well as kids.

“When I was a part of CLV, I felt like I was a part of something…I was able to feel like I was part of a culture there.”

CLV UCSC Alum

4 university students sit in a circle of desks in a classroom, working on laptops and laughing.
a child's hands hold colorful mesoamerican corn grains
three university students, one wearing a tie, stand next to a boy dressed up in a shirt and vest and holding a diploma. They are smiling.

Activity-based

A student with long hair stands next to a video tripod and a mentor with a beard and ball cap. At a table, a student holds a microphone next to a mentor.
a young student points to a desktop computer screen showing a Prezi presentation while an adult with long hair looks on.
University mentors and kids are outdoors playing a game. Most are standing in two lines facing each other with their arms outstretched. Two are kneeling down in the middle. The mentor in the middle is laughing.

Every moment is a workshop

In CLV, mentors learn to reframe learning and teaching as opportunities that we create, facilitate, and develop with others. Collaborative, participatory teaching and learning is important and applicable across all areas of the curriculum. CLV uses hands-on digital tools; topics and projects co-defined and relevant to the kids (science, professional pathways, fashion, culture, community issues) and methods developed over generations in the field of critical literacy work to build confidence, agency, and critical communication skills among all participants.

  • As activity planners, we create a tangible activity. This is a space with materials, tools, and helpers. Activities can be games; a brainstorm for a story; a text or a video we read and discuss together; a hands-on or whole-self project involving art, drama, or movie-making with interview. We weave digital media tools into the ways we read, communicate with each other, and create.
  • We facilitate access, sharing, contributions, innovation, and development among diverse participants.
    • Participants create, interact with each other, change their ideas, change the activity, and tap into their power to change the story they’re in.
  • Sense-making and problem-solving together builds relational power.
    • We work on skill-development and community challenges by identifying diverse strengths and goal-setting together.

Teaching-learning programs like CLV dissolve the traditional hierarchical roles and boundaries between teaching, learning, and research. Work in CLV prepares students for further professional and academic pathways in teaching and research, and in any type of work supporting and facilitating steps toward inclusion, equity, and well-being with children, families, and communities.

a young girl sits on the carpet in the foreground, smiling into the camera. In the background, a community circle-web is visible. A boy leans back, smiling, to see the camera.
A community web activity to wrap up the quarter’s work

Language as Resource

In our space, languages–and other means of communication– are world-making assets, not problems.

Developing broader and deeper understandings of “Language as Resource,” as principle and as practice, is one of CLV’s primary contributions to curricula and pedagogies for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

CLV’s approaches to language as a fundamental aspect of belonging, well-being, and development in formal and informal learning spaces are based on more than a century of research in Education, Psychology, and Social and Cultural Anthropology. Widely recognized authors in this tradition include Lev Vygotsky, Paulo Freire, Michael Cole, Kris Gutiérrez, and Barbara Rogoff.

CLV is part of a movement to develop acceptance of translanguaging (Garcia & Wei 2014) and Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso 2005) as models of positive power in our schools and societies more generally.

  • Although we don’t see language diversity as a problem, it is clear that everyone in our space has experienced language difference in those terms. Our shared challenge is to create a space and activities that create a new experience, and give us all new ways of thinking and new tools to make change.
  • Activities that offer “multi-modal” ways to communicate–art, music, drama, photography, video, and online tools–open up many channels for participation, learning, and development alongside verbal modes.

Inquiry-based & transformative

Open-ended questions create spaces for belonging, & tools for change

As planners, facilitators, mentors, and researchers, we use an inquiry-based, problem-solving approach to community-building and learning with each other.

  • We use small-group pods, table teams, and projects to encourage investment, creativity, and co-ownership of program space found in popular education and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR).
  • We use Council, collaborative agreement process (Contrato-making), and other techniques for mutual accountability and support, also found in Restorative Justice approaches.
  • All of our activities and approaches to learning start with questions as “space-making” that invites reflection, story-telling, and different perspective.
  • Our program is dedicated to fostering critical question formation and pursuit of new ideas.

Studying “engagement”

Three boys sit at a table around a Mac laptop with a bright orange shell. The boy in the middle has his hands on the keyboard while the other two look on.
This photo follows in close sequence after the previous one. In this one, the photo is slightly more zoomed in. The boy working at the laptop bends more closely toward the screen. The boy on the left has moved over to see the screen. The boy on the right is no longer visible.

Corre la Voz uses the UC Links “engagement” metric as a basis for studying in depth how our program is serving current students. Our multi-domain engagement field rubric helps us discuss and learn from our situation each week, and to adapt and change as we go.

What does engagement look like?

a student wearing a bright green mask with tinsel hair and a suit-jacket costume holds the front of the mask while a young adult mentor works on the back of it
several young students are sitting around a group of desks, looking in the same direction. Two of them have their hands raised.

Do we have fixed ideas about what it means to be “engaged” in learning?

Over time, CLV participants have also developed very interesting critical discussions about what “engagement” means, and what the implications are for field research and education. Learn more about how CLV was developed through participatory design.

(Stay tuned for our Gallery and Projects page…under construction)