Q&A with Charles Underwood

As founding director of UC Links, you surely know lots of the history of the program. Tell us about your path to UC Links.

I’ve always been really interested in the way people think about their world and their lives and how they learn about their world and their lives. As an anthropologist, my first fieldwork was with Scottish, small scale fishermen, and then later, I worked with fishermen on the Southeast coast of India also on small craft -- rafts, really. And one of the things that really interested me about both of those situations was how changing technology affected people, the way they work together, the way they thought about their work and the way it impacted their everyday lives and relationships.

And then later, I worked at the UC President's office doing background research for the Task Force on Black Student Eligibility, a group of African-American scholars and administrators from across the UC system who focused on really difficult issues about what has persistently kept African-American students at relatively low rates of eligibility for UC. Later, I worked with the Latino Student Eligibility Task Force as they looked at some of the same issues.

Working with those scholars immersed me in questions of ongoing educational and social inequity. I saw then that it’s an urgent question -- a matter of life and death, as recents events have shown us -- shocking us yet again with the hard fact that racism and racist brutality are ever-present in our country. We simply can’t distance ourselves from this viral force all around us.

Learning from the collective knowledge and experience of these Task Forces, I came to see this fact viscerally as an everyday horror for African American and Chicanx/Latinx young people and their families, and it led me to focus on learning in and out of school as a way to transform the brutal social system in which these young people continue to find themselves.

I was then asked to work with the sociologist, Hardy Frye, in a new UCOP program called the Urban Community School Collaborative, charged with building collaborations between UC campus and local community-based organizations and schools in communities near the campus. It was then that a couple of faculty from UC San Diego, Michael Cole and Olga Vásquez, approached us about an idea that would help to increase the number of underrepresented students be prepared and eligible for UC.

Dr. Frye asked me to go along with Professors Cole and Vásquez to all the UC campuses to see if anybody was interested, and we found strong interest at seven out of the then nine UC campuses. We proposed to UC President Richard C. Atkinson a statewide effort that supported both faculty and community engagement around after school learning for underserved kids.

President Atkinson gave us funding to do this collaborative work for two years. He didn’t like the name “UC Links” but we told him we could change that later.

The idea was to extend the University’s work with K-12 into the early elementary school grades, using a mixture of formal and informal learning strategies. Then as the Internet came fully on the scene, we began to use various kinds of web-based informal activities that engage kids with their communities, with their world, but also provide opportunities for them to explore and write about things that they found fun, things they themselves were already interested in.

We did this as a way of engaging students who had become disengaged from school. That was the point of working after school – you could do innovative things that teachers were not able to do because of all of the curricular guidelines telling them what they had to do, on what day, in what way.

So we had a lot more play or leeway in framing different kinds of learning activities that engage them, especially in building multiple literacies.

After our first two years, we were reviewed by President Atkinson and his staff, and he liked what he saw, so he made UC Links a part of UC’s permanent budget.

ABOUT CHARLES UNDERWOOD

Charles is the founding director of UC Links. He earned his PhD in anthropology and worked as a researcher and analyst for the University of California, Office of the President before being asked to serve as Executive Director for UC Links in 1996.

A Vietnam-era veteran, Charles served as a U.S. Navy paramedic from 1971 to1976, an experience that prompted him to pursue a career in medicine. After active duty, he pursued pre-med studies at Virginia Commonwealth University but an anthropology class taught by Colin Turnbull proved so fascinating that he changed his major.

Charles has since conducted research in a variety of occupation, legal and educational contexts. He has worked closely with small-scale fishing communities in Scotland and India, with indigenous communities across the United States, and with programs that serve children living and working on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil. From 2005-2008, working with colleagues from Louisiana State University, Southern University, and local communities, he helped organize and implement collaborative programs at evacuee camps in Louisiana providing educational and social services for children and families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

In 2019, the UC Office of the President named Charles a recipient of the Dr. Winston C. Doby Impact Award. Both an anthropologist and a classical scholar, Charles is the author of Mythos and Voice: Displacement, Learning and Agency in Odysseus' World (Lexington Books, 2018), as well as a number of articles on contemporary issues of displacement, learning and agency among children in Brazil and the United States.

In his retirement, Charles is looking forward to finishing a book about UC Links and plans to return to his lifelong interest in sculpture, while continuing to work and write with UC Links colleagues across the globe.

What happened in those two years that so impressed him?

We showed President Atkinson within two years that there was significant faculty interest across disciplines -- in other words, that UC Links was a robust strategy for faculty engagement and community engagement. We had 14 viable programs with school and community partners who were committed, eager to keep going. And we had university departments and faculty and their students very much engaged.

Atkinson thought that this was a cool idea. And it was cool, not only because it supported K-12 teaching and learning, but also because it really supported building quality undergraduate and graduate education because all of the programs involved undergraduates and graduates learning rigorous academic content in class and then seeing its relevance by working directly with kids in real-world settings.

It sounds like one of the early iterations of this idea about research-based knowledge being immediately implemented.

Sure - an early instance of research-practice partnerships and community-based program design. We often had teachers involved. Especially in those programs that were in school sites, teachers were integrally involved in the planning and preparation and supervising of the activities after school.

I remember once I was asking an elementary school teacher how she became involved, and she said to me, “Well, there was a kid in my class and he wasn’t a great student, but one day he asked if we could write stories and I thought, `well, why not?’ And then I was just wondering why this kid, who wasn't doing very well, was so eager to write.”

She went to the after school program and saw how this kid had become more and more engaged after school in the acts of reading and writing and engaging with his world through the UC Links program.

How have you seen after school programs evolve over the years?

It started in 1996 and the development of the Internet was already burgeoning at that point, and it really took off in the years after that. The Internet was becoming an alternative reality and with it emerged new opportunities for learning about the world, and new opportunities for creating really engaging activities using new technologies, so that you could get kids really excited about reading and writing while they were learning about new multimedia technologies.

The growth of digital media became a resource for UC Links and it became part and parcel of the way we worked -- no division between work and play, no division between studying and reading for enjoyment, and no distinction between the world in the school book and the world all around us. Using the Internet gave students a different feel for that connection they had, both to their own community and to the larger world around them.

I think that was the spirit in which we began UC Links, and so the always evolving new digital media enables us to carry that forward. A lot of the students we worked with didn't have those kinds of digital media in their homes and still don’t for that matter. UC Links gives them access.

What are some big take-aways you want people to know about UC Links?

First of all, UC Links is a way of engaging the disengaged. Taking students who are not doing well in school, as well as those who are, and getting them together and engaging them in activities that enable them to learn about their community, about their own culture and language, as well as the larger world around them; and to develop a critical understanding of their world over time. UC Links is about enabling kids to question the world around them, why it is the way it is, and what can be done about it if you don't like it. It’s about showing them the tools -- enabling them to act on their world.

Another takeaway is that UC Links extends access to new digital media and technologies that many kids otherwise would not have access to. This is true even now. UC Links represents a way of using new technologies for inclusion, for bringing students into an engagement with their world, including their world of school, their participation in school and their success throughout their K-12 years, and finding a pathway to higher learning. It’s also very much about young people finding their voices, and acting to change what they see is harmful and unfair.

Why retire now?

Well, I never imagined that I would be involved for 24 years. But what kept me involved was that along the way, there were intense challenges to the ongoing existence of UC Links, intense historical challenges, and well as newly emerging opportunities. Again and again, there has been pressure to extend the school day into the after school hours. Because we resisted that pressure, there have been times when our existence as an educational initiative was questioned.

I’m proud that during all this time, the UC Links community has held true to our own standards and spirit in order to keep the activities we offer kids largely informal, to keep them fun, to keep them as activities that engage and enliven young people rather than simply controlling, testing, or tracking them.

What we’ve learned is that all young people are brilliant in their own ways; all of them are eager to learn. It’s up to us to find the ways that captivate and cultivate that brightness.

There is still so much to do. The COVID-19 crisis has been a huge disruption, but hopefully a productive disruption. It represents an enormous opportunity to transform education - and we’ve seen a deepening of our collaborative work together. But for me, it will not be in the same role. I need to find other ways to be part of the struggle -- the long journey to change the way things are, a step at a time, or a bold leap forward.

Why am I retiring now? Because we all reach a point in our lives when our bodies can’t keep pace with our passions and enthusiasms. I’m now slower at everything I do, so I want to do things that are more in pace with my own heartbeat.

So what's next for you?

Well, I'm still learning. I'm working on a book with Mara Mahmood about university-community engagement. We’re looking at UC Links’ work in California and beyond -- for instance, our work in Louisiana where we provided social and educational resources for children and families displaced by Hurricane Katrina. We made a key impact there, and how that work came about collaboratively is important to address.

So we're looking not only at the kinds of pedagogical relationships and learning strategies that take place for young people in UC Links programs but we’re also looking at the learning that takes place among adults -- the university and school and community partners -- as they try to build these programs together.

There’s a tremendous amount that university faculty and students have to learn from community people in order to work effectively and productively in the communities where they want to work. And of course, for the school and community people there's a lot they have to learn about what it takes to work with the university.

You have basically clashing cultures, clashing calendars, and conflicting institutionally based perspectives on the world, and so people have to build bridges across the gaps between institutions, between the cultures. Learning how to build those bridges is what continues to fascinate me.

As the killing of George Floyd shows us, there’s other urgent work to be done now, and I plan to keep at it. At every stage of life, the coming of age brings new kinds of pain, new limits, but it also gives us a longer view -- to see new ways to give back to the world what we’ve been given.

I feel impelled to write about what we’ve done, both what we’ve accomplished and the formidable work still before us. And there's a lot more I would love to do before my eyes give out, or my knees -- all the things that start to slow you down, just as you’re seeing how much more there is to learn and how much more there is to do, to change the world around us.