Who we are
Corre la Voz is the legacy of 15 years of activist work, and the potential for so much more.
The program was founded to combine University and Community resources that could develop new spaces, and new ways of teaching, learning, and building support for latinx students in Santa Cruz.
Hundreds of kids and undergraduate students have now contributed to and benefited from the program, along with parents, faculty, graduate students, school teachers, and staff. People have contributed their care, creativity, funds, problem-solving resources; and by showing up and being themselves each day. (See more on this development process.)
CLV’s programming–its techniques, routines, and principles–are the result of the participatory strategies, findings, and arguments developed especially by generations of undergraduate students, some of whom became paid staff and leadership. Those who have contributed the most have always said they hoped the program would continue to evolve and expand, and to serve rising generations of latinx leaders in our region.
Our Team
Leslie López
Leslie is the Director of Corre la Voz and instructor of Oakes/Education 151A/B, Community Literacies.
Read more about Dr. López
Roberto de Roock
Roberto is PI on the UC Links grant for Corre la Voz. Read more about Roberto de Roock
Carla Suárez Soto
Carla is a graduate student in the Education Department and a GSR on the UC Links grant for Corre la Voz.
We will be hiring student staff for Spring!
Mentors who elect to repeat 151B for 3 units can apply for a paid Program Assistant position as well. We need lots of help with digital data and our final event, Family Night.
University-School-Community Partnerships
Corre la Voz is a University-Schools-Community collaborative endeavor. It is made possible through continually renewed agreements, shared resources, shared aims, and communication among institutional partners; site collaborators; students; family members; and many staff and community supporters. CLV staff work hard to maintain these agreements and to serve all constituents in order to maintain and develop this evolving campus-community resource.
University-Community Links (or UC Links)
…is the network of programs, scholar-practitioners, and funding source that has supported Corre la Voz since it was founded. UC Links is based in the Education Department at UC Berkeley.
Read more about the UC Links network in this open-access edited volume: University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal. Mara Walsh Mahmood, Marjorie Elaine, and John Cano, eds. (2024)
Read about CLV in Chapter 3: “Putting Culture, Language, and Power in the Middle: Dual-language, Participatory Arts for Building Community and Making Change,” by Leslie López.
UC Santa Cruz
…is the campus home of the Corre la Voz Program since 2009. upport for CLV is shared between the Education Department, which houses the grant and program activities; and Oakes College, which funds the undergraduate course that makes the program possible. The course, OAKS/EDU 151A/B is now cross-listed with Education. Find out how to enroll.
Santa Cruz City Schools
The Santa Cruz City School District has supported our work for 15 years, and is a signer on our shared aims. About 52% of elementary school students and about 42% of high school students in the district, on average, are latinx. The District’s HR staff works with us each quarter to fingerprint and clear our mentors quickly and smoothly, and free of charge. Since 2009, CLV has worked at Mission Hill and Branciforte Middle Schools, but has the longest history at Bay View Elementary, near campus. Learn more about CLV Afterschool.
Senderos Santa Cruz
Senderos is a community organization specializing in teaching arts education, Latino culture and history, and in promoting a college-going culture in Santa Cruz. Senderos has helped to create a mutually supportive way for for families and students to belong, to learn, and to express themselves, in afterschool programs and in public celebrations. CLV and Senderos united formally during Covid-19 to reach out and support students and families unable to engage in remote learning.
Shared Aims
The shared aims of our partnership are:
- to provide multi-modal literacy enrichment and positive role modeling for middle-grade Dual-Language (Spanish-English) or Spanish-speaking students; and
- to build sustainable university-community channels and tools for effective, participatory, culturally relevant community development that will improve immigrant Latinx community members’ opportunities to thrive and pursue their full potential.
CLV works to advance these aims this on three levels:
A) Program Structure and Community Capacity Building: This language-rich, community- oriented teaching-learning lab in an afterschool program setting aims to improve students’ engagement, self-efficacy, and purposeful approaches to learning as well as their sense of belonging and well-being.
B) Program Curriculum and Pedagogies: Program content and methods aim to expand students’ communication skills, confidence, participation, and critical thinking, while building academically relevant vocabulary, organization skills, digital literacy, and reading and writing.
C) Advancement of Regional Equity and Social Justice Goals in our Institutions: The program aims to improve UCSC’s retention and professional pathways for first-generation Latinx students, while improving the District’s equity gap for DLL students and newcomers, especially at the secondary school transition point.
History
Corre la Voz (CLV) has been creating new ways of collaborative teaching and learning to serve dual-language latinx communities in Santa Cruz since Fall, 2009. Program founder Dr. Leslie López of UCSC developed the original agreement between the Education Department and Santa Cruz City Schools, funded with a grant from the UC Links network.
We started with three mentors, three point and shoot cameras, a group of curious kids and a middle school counselor–and the sense that we could create something new. The word spread quickly, and soon we were running programs in two middle schools each week. For the first year we had no campus meeting space, so our teams met off-campus in the apartment of one of our mentors.
Collaborative social design
In the beginning, we had more questions than curriculum: Which activities were “working” to generate energy, excitement, ideas, memories, curiosity…engagement? Which were harder, and why? Which activities showed sudden breakthroughs after practice? Did this happen with some kids and not others? What mentoring strategies or arrangements made this more possible? What was really not working at all…and why?
One of our earliest and clearest findings was that even as our program developed and improved, our “pop-up” program needed a consistent, predictable environment–a larger “ecology” of support for kids, families, and programs where we could provide added value each week and over time.
In 2011, we moved the whole program from two middle schools to Bay View Elementary, which had just launched a free afterschool program and a bilingual community coordinator position. And in 2013, CLV moved to Oakes College, as the cornerstone of the new service-learning program, the “CARA” (Community-based Action Research and Advocacy) program, formally established by Director Leslie López in 2017. For years, CLV thrived, grew, and developed curriculum, teaching-learning strategies, equipment, and program pieces.
Expanding applications and settings. Drawing on documented successes, CLV has worked with UC Links to expand and apply these across curricular areas, age groups, and site settings. For instance, for six years, CLV providing bilingual and multi-modal “math literacy” training for mentors and support for students, along with language-rich digital storytelling, movie-making, and cyclical participatory action research projects. (See “Elotes and Eviction: Snapshot Perspectives from Youth on the Beach Flats Community Garden“).
Quantum Leap and Club Links
- CLV’s collaborative designs and pedagogies were also used in a dual-language Bay View program for hands-on math and “maker science” with Physics students, called “Quantum Leap/Salto Cuántico” (2014-15). Teams built marble mazes, and studied and tested different varieties of paper airplanes and balloon cars. We used photography and video to document everything, and celebrated projects at a Bay View afterschool Science Fair.
- At the same time, we worked with the Downtown Boys and Girls Club Teen Room, and developed “Club Links.” CL faculty, mentors, and youth piloted a critical YPAR photovoice and video interview project analyzing their sense of power.
- These successful techniques also propelled the development of a campus-engaged afterschool and youth program network through the OAKS 152 “Transformative Literacies” course.
Although these programs and strategies produced great results for participants and helped develop our pedagogies, they could not be sustained without campus or community investment, and they quickly folded.
During Covid-19, CLV partnered with Senderos Santa Cruz, expanded our sites, and went online to create digital projects and cultivate well-being with students kept at home.
Since 2022, CLV has been working with the Education Department to regain momentum and develop new, scalable designs. We look forward to new collaborations, new designs, and new research strategies, aligned with our university’s and our community’s values, commitments, and needs.