From Margo Fryer , Founding Director of the UBC Learning Exchange
Thanksgiving 2024
This website was originally launched in early 2014. I created the website in order to tell the story of the early evolution of the University of British Columbia’s Learning Exchange and to offer reflections on what my staff team and I learned as we created and sustained this effort to make connections between UBC and the Downtown Eastside, well-known as Canada’s poorest and most troubled neighbourhood.
Over the past ten years, much has changed. The discourses about community-university engagement and community service learning and other forms of community-based experiential learning have changed. The dynamics within both the university and the Downtown Eastside have changed. The way people access information on the Internet has changed. And I have changed.
Given all these changes, the content on the website no longer seems current; it seems dated. Rather than contributing to today’s discourses on important topics like how a mainstream institution can forge trusting relationships with marginalized people or how students can be inspired to make service an integral part of their lives, the content on the site now seems mostly of historical interest.
For this reason, I and Rex Turgano, who has been responsible for all the technical aspects of the site since its inception, have decided it is time to decommission the site. However, in order to continue to make the site accessible to those who might have a specific, focused interest in the site’s content, the site will continue to be freely accessible to those who register as “members.” This will allow people to access the site as an archive, knowing that they should not necessarily expect the content to be reflective of current issues or discourses.
The website has five sections:
About: provides introductory information about the site and its contents as well as background information about the author.
Context: discusses the context for the initiation and development of the Learning Exchange, including descriptions of the ways in which UBC and the Downtown Eastside are very different but surprisingly similar.
The Learning Exchange Story: tells the story of how the Learning Exchange evolved from a controversial idea rooted in the university’s new vision for the twenty-first century to an entity that was trusted because of the way it did its work.
Reflections: includes reflections from the author on related topics including: The realities of social marginalization; the Learning Exchange as an example of social innovation; how young people can learn to act as change agents; and the deeper questions that the work of the Learning Exchange revealed.
Taking the Plunge: archived blog posts on the topic of community-university engagement written by the author that appeared in “University Affairs” from 2012 to 2013.