Chapter 5: Cultivating a Sense of Place for and With Immigrant Students Through University, School, Community Partnerships:

In this chapter, we explore the impact of a two-year university-school-community civic learning collaboration that engaged Latinx immigrant students in their middle school classroom in two distinct but complementary urban planning projects. We demonstrate how cultivating reciprocal relationships between students, educators, university mentors, and community partners, activating their civic skills, and focusing on the mutual learning process along the way cultivated a sense of place and agency in immigrant youth. Meanwhile, by leveraging students’ bilingual ability and bicultural knowledge as assets for their communities, these young people began to shape the attitudes and policies of their university mentors, urban planners, and educators alike. We explore the learning process for both students and adults and shed light on the unique position these students came to occupy as essential and powerful champions of change for their communities, their region, and the nation.