Growing Through the Cracks: Community-Engaged Education and Countering School Disengagement

In this paper, I lay out the possibilities for community-engaged education as a tool for countering school disengagement with marginalized youth in Toronto. Using interviews and observations with staff, youth, and parents who participate in a community-based tutoring and mentoring program, I explore how the program’s grassroots commitments work to minimize marginalization and the pushout of students within the Latinx and Portuguese communities in Toronto. By building relationships based on trust and responding to the community’s needs, parental engagement, and academic-community partnerships, the program creates a space of community engagement that involves the whole family in changing narratives about both communities and their place within the public education system. I posit that this type of community-engaged education is effective in increasing access to postsecondary education for traditionally marginalized students.