January - August 2019
The Division of Government & Community Relations at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) for over a decade has partnered with grassroots organizations and immigrant communities living in Clonias* to garner greater civic engagement within higher education. By facilitating a process called the Community Learning Exchange (CLE), we utilized deliberative processes to co/create place-based curricula, increase university-youth engagement, and various other initiatives.
While the CLE process had made a great impact on the diversifying how the university designed policies and services, the knowledge of how to conduct a CLE was never recorded succinctly as a process. Through extensive research and facilitating the CLE process, I created a Toolkit and a timeline to document the history of the work so that other communities and institutions can conduct a CLE and amplify the CLE impact.
*Clonias are low-income semi-urban subdivisions outside city jurisdictions along the U.S.-Mexico Border with substandard public services
Photos of two CLE processes: Place-based Curriculum and University-youth Engagement
