Negotiating time and space: The challenges of “borrowed” time and space in community-engaged learning
Lina Martínez Hernández
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Haverford College
Different definitions of “borrowed time” associate it to the specificity of temporal experience in the contemporary West: from borrowed time manifested in debt-based forms of capitalist exploitation (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010), to borrowed time as a ticking alert pointing to the critical conditions of climate change and the finite conditions of natural resources (Tilton 2003). In these definitions there is a clear connection between the speed of production and consumption, and the limitations or uncertainty of how sustainable these practices are. In a similar vein, and in dialogue with these definitions, I offer a reflection on “borrowed time” anchored in two intersecting perspectives: the experience of recently arrived migrant communities and college students in contemporary USA. This reflection stems from a community-engaged learning collaboration that I facilitate, together with our project coordinator, Marguerite Kise, between students in my classes at Haverford College and Spanish-speaking migrant rights organizations and community leaders in Philadelphia. Can the awareness of a shared sense of “borrowed time” for recently arrived migrants and migrant rights organizations and college students create the conditions for unexpected and mutually beneficial forms of collaboration? In what ways does their differing experience of “borrowed time” reveal power imbalance and resource limitations, but also alternative modes of knowledge production and unexpected avenues for mutuality for community-engaged education in higher-ed?
By the end of the fall semester of 2022, one of our community partners, the migrant rights organization, New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, unexpectedly had to shift gears and face an immense challenge: to welcome buses bringing large groups of recently arrived asylum seekers suddenly sent from Texas to the East Coast. Plans we had made over the summer flew out the window. Time had shifted and now we had to adapt. We had planned that the students taking my community engaged class, Blackness in (Latin) Americas, would be having frequent conversations with NSM’s staff and base organizers by this time in the semester. They would be sharing the work they began in early September, co-creating historical guides for community instructors to facilitate workshops about anti-racism, and more specifically anti-black sentiments, in Spanish speaking migrant communities living in the US.
Our class had to adapt, and we considered it was a slightly easier change to make given that our classroom and our academic contexts were more “isolated from real life” or followed a set of rules and expectations that could be better controlled or curated. Contrastingly, NSM’s use of their time and staff pivoted drastically, as they now had to figure out how, with a staff of 6 people, they could attend the emergency and keep their long-standing campaigns and commitments running. Seen together, these two forms of adaptation connect with what I will define here as “borrowed time”. In our partnership, our classroom follows the parameters of the academic semester, a “borrowed time” from “real life”, when students, faculty, and staff agree to delve into a temporal suspension in order to prioritize structured forms of learning, knowledge production, and relationship building. After each semester ends, much of the learning, topics, relationships, practices, and routines change or end, at least in that particular iteration. For our community partners, NSM, “real life” and how much a small non-profit staff can accommodate, dictates shifts that happen from one day to the next. And even though there is a strategic plan in place and a calendar of meetings, events, campaigns, tasks, and goals, working with this particular community of migrants, with all kinds of immigration status subject to policy changes, court appointments, personal and communal needs, etc, naturally creates a more acute sense of uncertainty and a need to adapt quickly.
This experience led us to ask: how can we better work together knowing that our sense of “borrowed time” is dependent not only on the structure of our institutions, but also on matters of access, oppression, ability, and resources?
Our current collaboration with organizations like the New Sanctuary Movement has as its ultimate goal the creation of a bilingual (Spanish/English) digital political education curriculum, emerging from our relationship with local organizations in Philadelphia, but hoping to become an open access tool for community instructors and leaders in the United States and other Spanish-speaking international communities. Within the topics included in the curriculum, we are co-creating materials covering anti-racist practices in Latinx spaces, but also understanding LGBTQ+ communities and the intersection of migrant and lgtbq+ rights, and the connections between prisons and immigration detention centers in the US.
Haverford students involved in the Collaborations discussed here were interviewed on Atrévete, a bilingual show investigating the Latine community of Philadelphia on PhillyCam - a community media center. This group of students were enrolled in Caribe Cuir, where they had the opportunity to discuss and explore topics related to dissident sexualities and gender identities. Students built relationships with community members and community-led organizations to co-create videos that can help introduce basic concepts about LGBTQ experiences, lives, and rights to Spanish-speaking communities in Philadelphia. Students and community members participated in listening sessions that helped inform the videos they then shared with Atrévete.
Our collaboration began towards the end of 2020, in response to three critically emergent circumstances: a lack of protection for undocumented migrant communities during the COVID-19 pandemic; national uprisings condemning violence against Black people and communities; and an increase of deportations, detentions, and criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers. As community organizers and educators, it became evident through conversations within migrant communities that access to resources and education was crucial in order for everyone to have the opportunity to become informed participants in spaces of resistance and struggle. That is why we began our community-engaged learning project, inviting community members and Haverford students to remotely co-create materials for digital literacy in 2021, and then moved to offering digital literacy learning spaces in person in 2022. Moving forward with the co-creation of the digital political education platform, we are also committed to continue providing digital literacy to make these tools more accessible to people within local migrant communities.
As our collaboration and project grows, we become increasingly aware of the impact of that shared sense of “borrowed time”. The college students that become involved usually do so for one or two semesters, and their involvement is limited by how much time during the semester they can dedicate to this project beyond what is ingrained in the course syllabus and in addition to other courses and extracurricular activities. It also is limited by the circumstances of each individual student, noticing we have had first-generation and/or Latinx and BIPOC students wanting to be further involved in our project, but not having enough time to do so because of their work/study programs or the need to find jobs outside the college to provide for themselves. Similarly, faculty also face limitations when guiding these kinds of projects, dividing their time between teaching conventional courses, plus doing course design, preparing course materials, creating new and different forms of assessment for these modes of collaborative learning, and connecting the classroom - which meets at very specific and limited amounts of times during the week - with migrant community members who have very different schedules. Staff at the college also face additional challenges like negotiating with the institution to receive the funds and resources necessary to make these collaborations possible, manage stipends and payments for communities of migrants with mixed immigration statuses, and being able to provide this type of additional support to multiple faculty collaborating with different communities and different sets of circumstances and needs.
For our community partners, challenges occur at the individual and organizational level. The example offered earlier regarding NSM’s need to shift their plans makes it clear that non-profit organizations working for migrant justice must attend to critical and unexpected situations brought about by policy changes at state and federal levels. Similarly, these changes can also be brought by difficulties faced by the individuals and families they serve, including deportation procedures, difficulties accessing services like (urgent) healthcare, housing, legal advice, etc. It is also very common that organizations have a reduced staff and work with multilingual communities, often needing the services of language interpreters, and sometimes not being able to find people who can provide specific language support. All in all, “borrowed time” here may be experienced as a negotiation between a long-term strategic plan and a short-term fragmented time conditioned by crisis-response. For individual members of migrant communities, their sense of “borrowed time” may look more like learning to navigate a new system upon arrival, including making sense of the legal processes to apply for permanent residency, but also finding housing, enrolling children in school, managing short-term and not well paid jobs, and finding the time to support their families back home, financially and emotionally, and most importantly, living with a sense of uncertainty for their stability and safety.
Having an overview of these contrasting experiences of “borrowed time”, how can we use this awareness to co-create learning spaces that are respectful of all the experiences we bring and that help us create a sustainable and just exchange for everyone involved? So far, we have identified ways in which “borrowed time” brings important lessons when facilitating community-engaged learning collaborations. When considering the potential this sense of temporality can provide, we know we must continue to strive to achieve the following:
Flexibility and trust are key: we often emphasize in our classrooms that more than “results” our priority is to build meaningful relationships with everyone involved in the project. There is a lot of unlearning all of us had had to do in this process, including: changing the centrality of “grading” for students; demystifying college education and college campuses for community members; and, for faculty, trusting that students and community members can show up and lead spaces as they navigate learning from each other.
Popular education is our method: To unlearn, our project follows popular education methods, particularly understanding that every participant comes into the project as learner and teacher; following the lead and responding to the needs of our community partners; co-creating a project that promotes community leadership development and autonomy; re-distributing access to knowledge, material and symbolic resources, creating materials, research processes, and a platform that does not “belong” to the college, but to the community.
We shall move with the motions of “borrowed time”: we continue to learn how to keep the project moving even if there is a turnaround of students and community participants. It helps us identify what are the larger gears that should provide more stability, and what are the smaller gears that can provide movement and change. It also helps us get more comfortable with the idea of not moving “fast enough” or responding to self-imposed deadlines.
Do not get too attached to “the plan”: We have to revisit the project frequently. Facilitating community-led projects in collaboration with migrant justice organizations and community leaders means being able to adapt to the unexpected. This ability begins on the ground, with our students and community members, but also must be transferred upward to our engagement with the college, internal and external funders, and staff and faculty support. This might prove trickier when facing a sense of non-correspondence between white supremacist culture in higher education and its expectations around perfectionism, individualism, sense of urgency, and elitism around forms of knowledge production (for more see Characteristics of White Supremacy)
Honor everyone’s contributions and stay local: from the beginning, all the community participants co-creating with students have received stipends to honor their time and knowledge. We also strive to hire business and individuals within migrant communities involved in the partnership to provide catering for events, language interpretation, and other services. We have also connected with local migrant organizations to host our meetings and celebrations.
Advocate to make these projects equitable and sustainable: How can higher-ed institutions change and create better conditions not only for faculty, staff, and students leading and facilitating these projects, but also opening up spaces that bridge the distance between the college and our community partners. By this, I imagine initiatives like co-teaching with community instructors and providing fair retribution and credentials; supporting community project coordinators as fundamental liaisons, knowing staffing limitations in our partner organizations; educating other faculty and staff in the richness and intellectual potential of these kinds of projects, etc.
When I list these possibilities, I am filled with excitement and concern: will we be able to transform our educational spaces? It is clear that creating higher-ed spaces no longer disconnected from our communities demands changing how we think of education and who should have access to it. But I can say that, working with this generation of students and recently arrived migrant communities, the energy is all there to make this change a reality. Let us not lose the momentum offered by this shared “borrowed time”.
References:
Tilton, John E. On Borrowed Time? Assessing the Threat of Mineral Depletion. Washington, DC, Resources for the Future, 2003
Bauman, Zygmunt and Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo. Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo. Cambridge, Malden MA: Polity, 2010
Mertler, Craig (Ed). The Wiley Handbook of Action Research in Education. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2019
Davis, Katherine L, Brandon W, Kliewer, and Aliki Nicolaides. “Power and Reciprocity in Partnerships: Deliberative Civic Engagement and Transformative Learning in Community-Engaged Scholarship”. Journal of Higher Education, Outreach, and Engagement. (2017) 21.1, pp. 30-54
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Working at the intersection of academic practice and community-engaged transformation, Lina Martínez Hernández currently is a faculty member in the Spanish Department at Haverford College and an active community member working for migrant and LBTQ+ rights in the Philadelphia area. Originally from Colombia and identifying as queer, Lina works intentionally to bring popular education methodologies and understanding to her pedagogy and learning relationships. Through community engaged learning initiatives and projects, Lina dreams of connecting people and ways of being in the world that might have not been able to connect if they had stayed in their little corner.
Institutional Context: Haverford College is a small, highly selective liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. Students who attend Haverford tend to be young people interested in social justice and creating meaningful transformations in the world. One of the benefits of Haverford's small size is close faculty-student collaboration and opportunities to experiment with innovative pedagogy.
Snapshot Institutional Profile* The IPEDs database we have used for other profiles in this project was malfunctioning at the time this post was uploaded. This data will be updated in the days and weeks to come.
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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
Join us for, Stepping into the Work: Expanding understanding of global positionality, responsibility, and opportunity, a Collaborative gathering in partnership with the Global Engagement in the Liberal Arts Consortium at Haverford College, immediately outside of Philadelphia, November 10 and 11, 2023. Registration is open.