Q&A with Mara Welsh Mahmood

How did you first get involved with UC Links?

I first got involved with UC Links when it started in 1996. I was a graduate student at UC Riverside and there were two faculty members, Mary Gauvain in the Psychology Department and Sharon Duffy in the School of Education, who were interested in starting a UC Links program.

We partnered with a local elementary school, working with a sixth grade teacher, the principal and another school administrator. I taught the undergraduate course and I was the site coordinator for the after-school program. So I did everything from crawling around on the ground to try to wire computers to working with the students on the computers after school. I always joke that everything that I know about Microsoft Word, I learned from sixth graders. They knew way more than I did about how to use all of its fun features.

I finished my PhD in developmental psychology in 1997 and jumped at the chance to work as the Director of Site Development and Evaluation in the UC Links Statewide Office at Berkeley.

You’ve been involved for quite some time. Can you share some moments that keep you energized?

Those moments happen every time that I'm out visiting programs, whether it be in an undergraduate course or after-school program. Witnessing the powerful transformations that occur among students is very moving for me -- especially how transformative it can be for students to experience a non-hierarchical learning environment, shifting traditional roles of power, and as a result experience the roles of expert and novice as fluid and changing based on activity. When I talk with undergraduates, they tell me about how much they learn from working with the P-12 children and youth. The kinds of things that they’re quoted as saying in the reflections from our site visits describe these realizations and are things that I've heard firsthand since starting my journey with UC Links in 1996 -- and still can still move me to tears!

That's a super powerful experience for the P-12 students, as well – to be knowledgeable in that sense and to be seen as experts and that they are the ones who are in some ways teaching the undergraduates about how these programs work. Oftentimes, the P-12 students participate in these programs throughout the whole academic year, but a new group of undergraduates starts participating each quarter, or each semester. And so the P-12 students are the ones who are teaching the undergraduates what it means to participate in the culture of this after-school program.

So much of what keeps me going is the community – the leaders at the GSE and UCOP who are committed to this work and have supported it for almost 25 years and the passion and the commitment of everybody within the UC Links network to doing this work.

About Mara Welsh Mahmood

Mara has been involved with UC Links since 1996, when she was a graduate student at UC Riverside, teaching the UC Links undergraduate practicum course and serving as the site coordinator for the UC Links program at a local elementary school.

Upon earning her PhD in developmental psychology in 1997, Mara joined the UC Links statewide office as the Director of Site Development and Evaluation, where she stayed until 2004, when budget cuts forced the program to eliminate staffing. She went on to teach at UC Davis and worked as a consultant with the Glen Price Group, where she evaluated 21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school programs); facilitated strategic planning projects; and developed grant proposals for local and statewide agencies and organizations. Mara has studied and written about learning within and across multiple contexts including K-12, higher education, after-school, as well as out-of-school learning in São Paulo, Brazil. She returned as Associate Director of UC Links in 2018.

In her spare time, Mara enjoys going to the beach, spending time with family and friends, and walking with her dog. She tends to a flock of plastic pink flamingos and has been known to “flock” people in the dead of night with other mothers, planting the flamingos in people’s yards for special occasions.

With schooling being done remotely, what’s happening within the UC Links programs? It’s harder to distinguish between the formal school and afterschool/informal school day, right?

The boundaries between in-school and after-school have definitely become blurred. We’re finding that partners are working together to remake the “school day.” Undergraduates are working alongside classroom teachers on virtual learning platforms and creating multilingual resources for families who are now homeschooling their children. A faculty member at UC Davis is partnering with MakerEd and the Boys & Girls Club of Sacramento to put together and distribute kits with raw maker materials.

The undergraduates in the UC Links class at UC Davis are making “how to” videos and posting them on their YouTube channel, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. These videos demonstrate how to use the materials to make things like a foosball game out of some popsicle sticks and a shoebox; or making a card with an LED light with copper wire.

Children are going to the Boys & Girls Club and picking up these materials that they can then use at home with their families. This is just one example but really all of the UC Links programs, across California and internationally, are responding in innovative ways.

As interim ED, what are your hopes, dreams, vision for UC Links, both short term and longer term?

I think in terms of vision, I would say that the vision for UC Links has been – and will continue to be – a strategy for three things:

preparing P-12 youth for higher learning;
improving undergraduate and graduate education; and
building sustainable university-community partnerships.

UC Links partners are key to maintaining this vision. It's a vision that is built and rebuilt over time by all the participants.

While the vision really holds true over time – the strategies that programs and partners use to achieve this collective vision are what evolve over time. The activities, practices, and pedagogies developed by UC Links partners are dynamic and constantly being transformed by the participants and by their participation.

In thinking about the short term, the COVID-19 crisis is really providing an opportunity to re-envision and to remake what these programs look like and how they're engaging in their work and to re-examine what strategies will carry us into the future, into this unknown future.

And I have to say that the work of the UC Links network and community is incredibly inspiring. People and programs are just rising to the challenge. Responding to this crisis has provided an opportunity to deepen university-community partnerships, in particular. We’ve found that school and community partners are reaching out to their university partners for support. Undergraduates are helping to facilitate video conference breakout rooms alongside classroom teachers, and engaging in read alouds and other literacy activities with children and families.

We're also seeing some interesting transformations among some institutions. For example, within weeks of the COVID-19 crisis, a school district gave university undergraduates school district e-mail addresses so that they can partner with the school to help address the needs of the students. I haven't seen that – ever – in my 20+ years.

This kind of institutional shift legitimizes how we partner and who partners in learning. It moves after-school out of the margins and provides an opportunity to break down the barriers between in-school and after-school and to work together to support children, families, and communities. I see this as the longer-term vision for UC Links -- engaging with school and community partners in using our collective experience during these disruptive moments created by the COVID crisis and the nationwide community uprisings to inform our reinventing of the educational process, both in and out-of-school.

On a more personal note, how did you choose this path to education, or did the path choose you?

Education was the culture in my home growing up. My mom was a school secretary, my dad was a special education teacher who went on to be a superintendent. I grew up going to my mom’s school and my dad’s classroom and the district office and the people who were family friends were teachers and administrators. I always thought that I wanted to be a teacher. My first job working in a school was when I was a senior in high school. It was a program for students who were struggling in a regular classroom context. It was basically a therapeutic kind of setting where I would have one-on-one, play-based interactions with elementary aged children.

I went to UC Santa Cruz and earned a BA in psychology and a multiple-subject teaching credential at the same time. I thought that I was going to go on and work in the classroom, but I started getting interested in research. I started working with Catherine Cooper at UC Santa Cruz and a project called Bridging Multiple Worlds, which was focused on understanding how ethnic minority youth navigated pathways to college.

Part of that experience included listening to university students, who were the first in their families to go to college, talk about their pathways to college. Hearing all of the students’ stories really made clear to me the complicated pathways and institutional barriers they had to navigate. I couldn’t help noticing that almost all of the students who I worked with at the elementary school program when I was in high school were Black and Brown, and with my dad being a Special Education teacher, this question of equity and access was constantly in front of me. It became a guiding question for me and my work.

When I found UC Links as a graduate student, it felt like home to me – I get to be part of a strategy to respond to educational inequity and institutionalized racism and put all of this together in an environment where we all learn together. It's not one person sitting in the front of the room trying to explain to everybody how to learn. It's actually engaging children and youth, who might not be successful during the regular school day and co-creating a space with them to learn and to be active and agentive in the construction of their own lives and futures.

What do you want people to know about you?

I love my job. I get to engage in meaningful work collaboratively with people whom I respect and admire. One of the most enjoyable parts of my job for sure are the site visits. And it's so important for my own learning. I wouldn't be able to do the job if I weren't in contact with the people, especially the undergraduates and the P-12 children and youth.

I'm honored to be given the opportunity to serve as interim executive director and to continue working with the UC Links community. It's been such a valuable experience to learn from Charles and the amazing leader that he is and to see how he has worked so thoughtfully to help develop and sustain this community. I value this community so much, and I keep coming back to it because it means so much to me.