Gevirtz School alumnus John Cano has been named University-Community Links (UC Links) Associate Director. UC Links is a collaborative network of university and community partners, working closely together to sustain after-school programs that extend access to quality educational resources and activities for P-12 youth from underserved California communities. As a member of the University of California’s Student Academic Preparation and Educational Partnerships (SAPEP), UC Links creates sustainable university-community partnerships, prepares students academically and socially for higher learning, and helps improve undergraduate and graduate education at UC and other partnering colleges and universities. The UC Links office is housed in the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at University of California, Berkeley.
John Cano (Education, Ph.D., ’21) is an educational technology scholar interested in how technology-mediated learning environments can enhance the learning experience of K-12 and higher education students. Cano also studies student engagement; online education; digital citizenship; intercultural education; and informal learning in after-school settings.
While at UCSB, Cano worked with Diana Arya (and also collaborated with Betsy Brenner and Richard Durán) as an instructional technology coordinator for Community Based Literacies programs, co-coordinator for the LEAFY (Literacies for Environmental Awareness and Farming for Youth) after-school program, and coordinator for the Club Proteo afterschool program. Cano has also made significant contributions to the UC Links network regularly presenting at the UC Links conference, including co-constructing a collaborative workshop with Katie Watkins (Utah) focused on ethnography. During the pandemic he helped develop “App-y hour” as a way to share and learn collaboratively about digital tools and was instrumental in the success of the first UC Links Virtual Youth Summit. As an international and bilingual (Spanish) scholar, most recently, John held the position of Assistant Professor in the Instituto de Estudios en Educación at the Universidad del Norte in Colombia, the same university where he earned his BS in computer science and M.Ed. in educational technology.