Chapter 7: Articulating Individual Learning and Community Development: College-Community Pathways for Asian Immigrant Adult Learners

This study examines a process of intensive college and community-based collaboration to create an integrated system that supports adult immigrant learners at different stages in their own educational plans. Based on four months of qualitative research, this study focuses on the perspectives of predominantly-Chinese, adult immigrant learners enrolled in a four-stage English Transitional Program (ETP) coordinated between two Chinatown community-based agencies and a local community college. The findings suggest ways in which adult immigrant learners’ prior knowledge can be recognized as both individual and community assets, albeit within the contexts and constraints of the local economy and the ecologies of the learners’ family systems. Beyond the findings, the research process—involving Chinese bilingual undergraduates trained in community-based research methods from Asian American studies and grounded in their own experiences as ESL adult learners—suggests that the process of defining, discovering, and constructing “community” that is intended as a long-term goal of the program model, is also possible through thoughtful, collaborative, bilingual/ bicultural research.