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This edited volume is part of the Information Age Publishing (IAP) Series on Family, School and Community Partnerships. This book addresses the ways families and communities engage with an increasingly common feature of the American public education landscape: charter schools. Family and Community Engagement in Charter Schools contains seven chapters examining this emerging field of study authored by both established and emerging scholars. Chapters examine how charter schools, the policy landscape, families, community institutions, and charter school educators both create and inhibit opportunities for effective family and community engagement. Data is included from intensely charterized school districts such as Los Angeles, Denver, New York City, New Orleans and Oakland as well as broader state-level perspectives from California and Massachusetts. The authors approach this important relationship without the fixed ideological lens that often colors research on this controversial from of school organization. In addition to highlighting their unique findings, chapters propose practical, research-based strategies for schools, districts, or communities so that charter schools can be strong sources of local democracy- an oft-cited but rarely achieved goal. The book will broaden the field of Family and Community Engagement by including new theories, scholars, and areas of study. It is valuable reading for researchers, graduate students, policymakers, educational leaders, and community-based organizations seeking to better understand this unique form of organizing public schools.

Just inside the school doors from the back parking lot, in the farthest reaches from the school entrance, there is a short corridor that leads to the hallway that houses Washington River High School's two English Learning classrooms. These classrooms offer both safe sanctuary for the school's growing population of Latinx students and a troublingly hidden space that allows most of the school and community to maintain the pretense of the generally prosperous, White, neighbor-helping-neighbor place of their myopic nostalgia. This Mayberry-like imaginary excludes the divisive sociopolitical battles of the last decade that have earned Washington River both local and national attention for a city ordinance that would fine landlords who rented to undocumented residents, a de jure policy that became de facto racial profiling. The English Learning classrooms are thus sites for the work of learning English and other academic subjects alongside the more abstract but no less important work of constructing citizen identities. In these spaces, adolescent Latinx newcomers negotiate and assert complicated claims about how they get to be of Washington River High School, the wider community of Washington River, and of the United States. As established residents and newcomers interact with each other (or not) in Washington River, they confront people who are linguistically, culturally, racially, and socially different from themselves. The polarized and contentious sociopolitical context of the United States in the wake of Donald Trump's election to the United States presidency in 2016 provides the backdrop to this nine-chapter book. The book centers the experiences of newcomer students as they construct citizen identities within the microcontext of their classroom and school and the macro-context of a changing and polarized United States. While this is an account of the local context of Washington River, the issues raised—welcome, unwelcome, belonging, and claiming rights—are not particular to Washington River. As part of the changing sociocultural landscape of the Midwestern United States, in which historically distinct groups come together in common spaces, Washington River High School offers an example of the concurrently familiar and uncomfortable ways that new receiving communities in the New Latino Diaspora (Hamann & Harklau, 2015; Hamann, Wortham, & Murillo, 2002) “host newcomers” (Lamphere, et al., 1992) within the common and complex institution of high school.

The American Psychological Association (2020) reported that some 81% of teenage children (13 to 17 years-of-age) were negatively impacted in a range of ways due to school closures in connection with COVID-19, including 47% who indicated that they “didn't learn as much as they did in previous years” (para. 21). That perhaps many more than 47% of teenage children in the United States did not learn as much as they did in previous years was documented in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report which found that “the national average score declines in mathematics for fourth- and eighth-graders were the largest ever recorded in that subject” (Wilburn & Elias, 2022, para. 1). The National Center for Educational Statistics Commissioner commented somewhat hyperbolically that the results showed that “every student was vulnerable to the pandemic's disruptions” (Wilburn & Elias, 2022, para. 5) and called for a single-minded emphasis on ways to assist students to recover from their trauma and accelerate their learning. Wilburn and Elias (2022) joined those who have pointed out that the learning declines associated with COVID-19 did not occur equitably. The likelihood of a single-minded policy response to change the system and address the achievement gaps exposed by the range of responses to COVID-19 seems small. On the one hand, doubting the sustainability of innovative responses, education historian Larry Cuban referenced the dominant stability of schooling which, if anything, “produces this huge public and professional need to resume schooling as it was” (Young, 2022, para. 18). On the other hand, diverse political agendas will diffuse concerted efforts. Grossman et al. (2021) discussed a pertinent example from Michigan where “public health data, partisanship, and collective bargaining” (p. 637) each played a role in determining school reopening decisions. On this same issue of school reopening, there is credible evidence from Massachusetts that the much maligned and politically explosive masking policies implemented in some schools may have saved lives (Cowger et al., 2022). Roy (2020) asserted that “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” (para. 48). The chapters in this volume attest to the willingness of individuals to collaborate in stepping through that portal.

Family and Community Partnerships: Promising Practices for Teachers and Teacher Educators, offers a fresh new look at the competencies, strategies, and practices that effective educators develop to build strong partnerships with families and communities. Written by leaders in the field, the book is an outgrowth of a cutting-edge initiative led by the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement to reimagine how educators are prepared for family and community engagement. Based on four guiding practices - reflect, connect, collaborate, and lead alongside families – each section of the book highlights theory, real-world strategies, discussion questions, and activities that can be used by teachers, teacher educators, and professional learning specialists to inspire new ideas for courses, workshops, and for self-reflection.

Beyond the Schoolhouse introduces eight paradigm shifts that are urgently needed to challenge inequities in education and improve the conditions for historically marginalized school children. The book provides educators and scholars with actionable strategies to shift the paradigm from schools alone to engaged partnerships with families and communities. Too many educators enter the profession with an incompatible paradigm, one that asks educators to resolve the problems facing school children from behind the closed doors of the school. The book offers a new paradigm, one that opens the power of partnerships to improve the conditions for school children from within and beyond the walls of the schoolhouse. Drawing thoughtfully on leadership theory, current research, and evidence-based practice, the author engages practitioners and scholars in a spirited and candid conversation about why partnerships with families and communities are needed in this era of rapid cultural change and soaring inequalities. The book features scenarios from the field along with lessons learned on the pitfalls and possibilities embedded in the paradigm shifts. The scenarios reveal how the partners leveraged their power to disrupt historical patterns of racism, classism, and nativism. The book offers a compelling analysis of the power of school, family, and community partners to embrace dramatically different paradigms for schooling. With anecdotes and illustrations, the author invites readers to consider their role in engaging in meaningful partnerships that reflect the community's best hopes for the education of their children. Her narratives offer a deeply rooted understanding of the possibilities and pitfalls of school, family, and community partnerships in a diversity of settings, including urban, rural, and tribal schools and systems in the U.S. and abroad. The chapters build hope and a realistic optimism that engaged partners can leverage their talents and resources and work together to bring best practices to scale for the benefit of children of diverse identities, cultures, and ethnicities. Chapters contain strategies and tools to tackle the growing inequalities which keep far too many children on the margins of schooling and furthest from justice and equity. Strategies include equity-focused protocols, structured questions for dialogue in virtual and face-to-face settings, and resources for extended reflection. The book may be useful for scholars in academic circles, principal and teacher preparation providers, novice and experienced educators and administrators, and the allies, school board members, and elected officials who are invested in enriching the education and well-being of school children and the families and communities they serve.

The Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools (2011) lamented the “lack of high-quality civic education in America's schools [that] leaves millions of citizens without the wherewithal to make sense of our system of government” (p. 4). Preus et al. (2016) cited literature to support their observation of “a decline in high-quality civic education and a low rate of civic engagement of young people” (p. 67). Shapiro and Brown (2018) asserted that “civic knowledge and public engagement is at an all-time low” (p. 1). Writing as a college senior, Flaherty (2020) urged educators to “bravely interpret... national, local, and even school-level incidents as chances for enhanced civic education and to discuss them with students in both formal and casual settings” (p. 6). In this eighth volume in the Current Perspectives on School/University/Community Research series, we feature the work of brave educators who are engaged in school-university-community collaborative educational endeavors. Authors focus on a wide range of projects oriented to civic education writ large—some that have been completed and some that are still in progress—but all authors evince the passion for civic education that underpins engagement in the democratic project.

In this book, internationally migrant families invite us to listen to the storylines of their mostly muted voices as they navigate the local schools in their new cultural context. They call us to hear them as they grapple with issues they encounter. They implore us to feel like an outsider and see the school as a foreign culture with language and communication barriers. The book is organized to enhance this carework. Each chapter begins with a vignette that includes the voices of one or more members of international migrating families, while introducing the context of the chapter. At the end of each chapter readers will find specific implications to consider. These are constructed with preservice teachers, practicing teachers, and educational administrators in mind. As you read each chapter, there is the call for school transformation. The families in this book entreat school personnel to engage with international migrant families and to embrace a risk and resilience model as we strive together for success. These storylines challenge us to examine our personal storylines for biases and deficit understandings and call us all to purposefully rewrite these in the spirit of possibilities as the families in this book have embodied for us.

Describing global trends in forced displacement in 2019, Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees declared that “we are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon”. At the end of 2019, almost 80 million people had been forced to leave the place they called home “as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order,” according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. This volume presents the concerted efforts of chapter contributors to alleviate the alienation of those who have been displaced and help them to feel at home in the country in which they have sought refuge. Chapter contributors highlight their endeavors specifically with Latino, Hmong, and African immigrants in the United States and Canada, as well as with a veritable united nations of immigrant identities in general. Endeavors oriented to making immigrants feel at home inevitably raise the vexed question of what it means to be a good member of a society—regardless of whether one is a citizen.

The perspective espoused by this volume is that collaboration among universities, schools, and communities is a crucial element in ensuring the provision of optimal learning environment for both im/migrant children and their parents. Chapter authors share their practice and theorizing regarding the many questions that arise when schools and universities collaborate with communities and build supportive structures to nurture literacy among im/migrant students. Enlightened teaching and culturally aware approaches from teachers engender support and cooperation from parents. Enlightened leadership is a constant thread through all the endeavors that are chronicled by contributors, as are the implications for socially just outcomes of successful implementation of inclusive pedagogies. Writing about the Children Crossing Borders study which began in 2003, Tobin (2019) asserted that “the social and political upheavals surrounding migration has (sic) put increasing pressure on the ECEC [early childhood education and care] sector to build bridges between the host and newly arrived communities” (p. 2). Tobin recalled that the original grant proposal for the Children Crossing Borders described young migrant children as “the true transnationals, shuttling back and forth daily between the cultures of their home and the ECEC [programs]” (p. 1)—programs staffed by well-intentioned individuals who nevertheless may “lack awareness of im/migrant parents'preferences for what will happen in their children's ECEC program” (p. 2). To extrapolate from Tobin's summary of the findings of Children Crossing Borders, for both the true transnationals (the children) and their parents, “the first and most profound engagement they have with the culture and language of their new host country” (p. 1) may well be mediated by a teacher who is unaware of the intricacies of the community.

Effective leadership is the necessary ingredient in achieving educational improvement in schools; everything rises and falls on leadership. For School Leaders of Color, this leadership imperative is more difficult than it is for their White counterparts. Concomitantly with this leadership necessity are the social and academic disparities of racism, student poverty, lack of resources, just to name a few. Yet these leaders have courageously accepted their role to disrupt low performance and thus they have created environments where students learn and professors teach. These leaders are “purveyors of change.” The purpose of this educational preparation supplemental text is to share stories of these exceptional leaders in the field and in the academy. The experiences shared by the various authors cover four important areas in leadership: Culture & Climate; Student Success; Resilience, Persistence, & Turnaround; and Social Justice. The authors have shared some deeply personal issues and triumphs. These are the stories that resonate more deeply with students and that with these types of stories, the theory to practice bridge is successfully crossed. While many of the chapters include narratives of resilience and triumph in the context of the P-12 education system, the overarching themes and suggestions can be transmuted to any industry.

A major premise of the book is that teachers, school leaders, and school support staff are not taught how to create school and classroom environments to support the academic and social success of Black male students. The purpose of this book is to help champion a paradigmatic shift in educating Black males. This books aims to provide an asset and solution-based framework that connects the educational system with community cultural wealth and educational outcomes. The text will be a sourcebook for in-service and pre-service teachers, administrators, district leaders, and school support staff to utilize in their quest to increase academic and social success for their Black male students. Adopting a strengths-based epistemological stance, this book will provide concerned constituencies with a framework from which to engage and produce success.

Rural life is more complex than it is perhaps credited. This edited volume explores several themes that highlight such complexities, particularly in terms of what they imply for rural teaching and learning. These themes include the geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic diversity within and across rural communities; the notion that rurality is not a deficit but rather a context; and the array of novel and interesting ways to build upon rural assets and overcome challenges so that rural students are not afforded fewer educational opportunities simply by virtue of their zip code. More practically, this book offers counsel for readers who may be interested in learning more about rural circumstances so that they can make informed and responsive decisions about policies and programs targeting rural students, educators, and schools. Praise for Cultivating Rural Education:'Making appropriate decisions about policy and practice in rural education settings demands an understanding of rural communities and the nuances of rural lifeways that are not standard fare in most decision-makers'professional backgrounds and preparation. This book clearly and insightfully helps guide readers to those understandings, offering a valuable resource both for individuals with nonrural backgrounds (as a thorough introduction to the salient contexts of rural education) and for those with rural backgrounds (as a guide for framing/reframing and clarifying their existing understandings).'Jerry D. Johnson, Professor and Lydia E. Skeen, Endowed Chair in Education Kansas State University'Howley and Redding have co-edited a book that brings to life the complexity of rural people and places and helps readers understand what this complexity means for rural education. The range of voices and research in Cultivating Rural Education demonstrates how varied rural places are, how real the educational challenges rural schools and districts face are, and how much strength and ingenuity rural people bring to the table to address those challenges.'Robert Mahaffey, Executive Director Rural School and Community Trust The book Cultivating Rural Education gives an actionable planning process to understand, define, and cultivate our rural schools and communities. The community and school are so closely tied together, it is time for our stakeholders and community members to highlight what is right and adjust the areas that need adjusting to help save and establish a true path(s) to sustainability for Rural America.'Allen Pratt, Executive Director National Rural Education Association

As the civic engagement gap widens across lines of race, class, and ethnicity, educators in today's urban schools must reconsider what it means to teach for citizenship; however, few resources exist that speak to their unique contexts. Teaching for Citizenship in Urban Schools offers lessons and strategies that combines the power of inquiry-driven teaching with a funds of knowledge approach to capitalize on the lived civic experiences of urban youth and children. Teaching for Citizenship in Urban Schools presents six strategies for making civic and social studies education relevant and engaging: using photovoice for social change, conducting culturally responsive investigations of community, defining American Black founders, enacting hip-hop pedagogy, employing equity literacy to explore immigrant enclaves, and drawing on young adult fiction to teach about police violence. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, each chapter includes an overview of the strategy and lessons for both elementary and secondary students. As a whole, these lessons draw on neighborhood resources, facilitate cultural exchanges among students and teachers, create community networks, and bridge schools and communities in a shared mission of building a just and inclusive democracy. This book is for anyone who values student-centered, inquiry-driven, and culturally-sustaining pedagogies that foster a deeper understanding of citizenship within a diverse democracy.

Critical Perspectives on Education Policy and Schools, Families, and Communities offers scholars, students, and practitioners important new knowledge about how current policies impact families, schools, and community partnerships. The book's authors share a critical orientation towards policy and policy research and invite readers to think differently about what policy is, who policymakers are, and what policy can achieve. Their chapters discuss findings from research grounded in diverse theories, including institutional ethnography, critical disability theory, and critical race theory. The authors encourage scholars of family, school, and community partnerships to ask who benefits from policies (and who loses) and how proposed reforms maintain or disrupt existing relations of power. The chapters present original research on a broad range of policies at the local, state/provincial, and national levels in Canada and the USA. Some authors look closely at the enactment of specific district policies, including a school district's language translation policy and a policy to create local advisory bodies as part of decentralization efforts. Other chapters reveal the often unacknowledged yet necessary work parents do to meet their children's needs and enable schools to operate. A few chapters focus on challenges and paradoxes of including families and community members in policymaking processes, including a case where parents demonstrated a preference for a policy that research demonstrates can be detrimental to their children's future education opportunities. Another set of chapters emphasizes the centrality of policy texts and how language influences the educational experiences and engagement of students and their families. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of implications of the research for educators, families, and other community partners.

THIS IS A UNIQUE BOOK. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLING AND THE WAY IN WHICH PARTNERSHIPS MAY HELP TO STRENGTHEN AND IMPROVE THEM AND THE INSTITUTIONS THAT PARTNER WITH THEM, YOU SHOULD READ IT! School partnerships have a long history in the United States. The inception of public schooling was a type of partnership with the community. The concept of local school boards and local control was integral to the establishment of schools and the idea that public education was a public good has deep roots in the country. Partnerships denote relationships which are mutually beneficial to the parties involved and which result in joint benefits for those who create and engage in them. The partnerships presented in this book provide ample evidence of the value and benefits of these arrangements. The book contains stories and research about school partnerships from a variety of groups and perspectives, which are focused upon multiple issues within educational institutions and communities within the United States. The final chapter, presents an analysis across all the partnerships to identify the elements that fostered and hindered their success and the primary lessons learned. This analysis should provide meaningful information for those engaged in developing and operating similar partnerships or those involved in conducting research on or about them. Although the cases presented in this book occur within the United States, the findings may also have relevance for similar initiatives in other countries. Praise for Creating School Partnerships that Work: A Guide for Practice and Research: Kudos to Dana Griggs and Frances Kochan for compiling the rich accountings of eight different school partnerships all in one place. Readers will learn a great deal from both the individual accountings of a broad array of partnerships as well as the collective analysis of the partnerships and lessons learned across them. Creating School Partnerships that Work:A Guide for Research and Practice is a must-read book for anyone who ever has been, is, or desires to be involved in any type of school partnership. Nancy Fichtman Dana, Professor, School of Teaching and Learning University of Florida, Gainesville Creating School Partnerships that Work: A Guide for Research and Practice is a must read for scholars, researchers, practitioners, and community members seeking to identify elements of successful school partnerships that foster students'academic and personal successes. This edited volume shares stakeholders'perspectives on multi-dimensional school partnerships, which have successfully led to sustained collaborations across diverse purposes that are mutually beneficial for all groups. The usefulness of the content analysis presented in the final chapter, which identifies elements both fostering and hindering partnerships with recommendations, cannot be overstated. Mary Barbara Trube, Professor Emerita, Ohio University-Chillicothe Contributing Faculty & Dissertation Mentor, Walden University Early Childhood Education Adjunct Faculty, Florida SouthWestern State College Mentor & Early Childhood Consultant, ILEAD Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Although teachers, school counselors, and administrators are all situated within educational settings tasked with supporting students'educational development, rarely do these professionals have sufficient opportunities to learn from and collaborate with one another before entering these schools. Unfortunately, many of these professionals are unaware of the primary and secondary responsibilities their peers and colleagues assume. What's worse, this lack of insight potentially compromises the extent to which educational leaders can forge effective partnerships that benefit students from the most alienated, disenfranchised and marginalized communities (e.g., Black children in under-resourced schools). While the educational discourse has included recommendations for maximizing interactions between these educational professionals, the collective voices of teachers, school counselors and administrators in regards to these issues has not been adequately examined. Thus, this book is a compilation of manuscripts and studies that explore partnerships and strategies educators and educational leaders use to produce positive socio-educational outcomes for Black students in various contexts.'Creating and Sustaining Effective K-12 School Partnerships: Firsthand Accounts of Promising Practices'is unique because it illuminates examples of effective school-community partnerships that foster positive student outcomes.'Creating and Sustaining Effective K-12 School Partnerships: Firsthand Accounts of Promising Practices'is intended as a practical text for committed educational leaders, at different professional points (e.g., practicing teachers, pre-service school counselors and teachers), who are eager to transform the current educational trajectory of Black children through interventions that show promise.

Since the late 1990s, mass school closures have reshaped urban education across the United States. Popular media coverage and research reports link this resurgence of school closures in major cities like Chicago and Philadelphia to charter school expansion, municipal budget deficits, and racial segregation. However, this phenomenon is largely overlooked in contemporary education scholarship. Shuttered Schools: Race, Community, and School Closures in American Cities (Information Age Publishing) is an interdisciplinary volume that integrates multiple perspectives to study the complex practice of school closure—an issue that transcends education. Academics, practitioners, activists, and policymakers will recognize the far-reaching implications of these decisions for school communities. Shuttered Schools features rigorous new studies of school closures in cities across the United States. This research contextualizes contemporary school closures and accounts for their disproportionate impact on African American students. With topics ranging from gentrification and redevelopment to student experiences with school loss, research presented in this text incorporates various methods (e.g., case studies, interviews, regression techniques, and textual analysis) to evaluate the intended and unintended consequences of closure for students, families, and communities. This work demonstrates that shifts in the social, economic, and political contexts of education inform closure practice in meaningful ways. The impacts of shuttering schools are neither colorblind nor class-neutral, but indeed interact with social contexts in ways that reify existing social inequalities in education.

A foundational tenet of the Out-of-School Time (OST) field is that all youth deserve impactful and engaging learning experiences. That requires that organizations, programs, and OST professionals remain responsive to the emerging needs of their diverse youth populations and the communities in which they live. This book illustrates the tensions that arise when organizations and OST professionals try to engage all youth, especially the traditionally underserved populations — when infrastructure, funding, and mindsets have not kept pace with the evolving needs of youth and their communities. The issues raised in this book — funding, outreach, engagement of immigrant families — have yet to be fully explored with an equity lens. Within these broad topics, this book brings to the surface the equity and access challenges as well as posit solutions and strategies. Each chapter is written from an insider's perspective, by practitioners themselves, who articulate some of the key and relevant issues in the field. Each chapter ends with a Research-Practice Connection section written by the editors, which discusses the topic from a research lens and generates a set of questions that can be used by researchers in future studies to explore the topic in a more in-depth, expansive manner. Book reviews and associated articles: Afterschool Matters: Practitioners Advance Equity and Access Learning in Afterschool & Summer: Equity and Access in OST Programs

This volume focuses on innovative school-university-community collaborations that are being implemented in rural places in the United States. A foundational belief that underpins the contributions to this volume is that rural communities contain within themselves the resources to promote and sustain vibrant educational endeavors. This belief has inspired a wealth of innovations that collectively offer a countervailing perspective to the view that global competitiveness is the preeminent goal of education, and that this goal is best served by “big education.” Since early last century, there has been a pervasive implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumption that rural places are bereft of the ability to educate children effectively. As repeatedly witnessed in this volume, in collaboration with universities, schools in rural places and the communities that both sustain and rely on them can appropriately configure the educational environment to optimally nurture the intellectual growth of children. The chapters in this volume are grouped into three parts that explore, in turn, the design features of innovative school-universitycommunity collaborations, some novel approaches to such collaborations, and the contours of parental and community involvement in such collaborations. Chapters discuss both larger scale collaborations that involve many school districts across wide -spread regions, and smaller scale collaborations that involve intensive engagements among the educators and members of smaller communities, and offer theoretical insights into the collaborative process itself. As mentioned above, two narrative threads run through the chapters: that effective collaborations address goals and aspirations expressed by those who are privileged to live in rural America, and that effective collaborations are oriented to building on the strengths inherent in the social fabric of those rural communities.

Following on from the preceding volume in this series that focused on innovation and implementation in the context of school-university-community collaborations in rural places, this volume explores the positive impact of such collaborations in rural places, focusing specifically on the change agency of such collaborations. The relentless demand of urban places in general for the food and resources (e.g., mineral and energy resources) originating in rural places tends to overshadow the impact of the inevitable changes wrought by increasing efficiency in the supply chain. Youth brought-up in rural places tend to gravitate to urban places for higher education and employment, social interaction and cultural affordances, and only some of them return to enrich their places of origin. On one hand, the outcome of the arguable predominance of more populated areas in the national consciousness has been described as “urbanormativity”—a sense that what happens in urban areas is the norm. By implication, rural areas strive to approach the norm. On the other hand, a mythology of rural places as repositories of traditional values, while flattering, fails to take into account the inherent complexities of the rural context. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four parts—the first three of which explore, in turn, collaborations that target instructional leadership, increase opportunities for underserved people, and target wicked problems. The fourth part consists of four chapters that showcase international perspectives on school-university-community collaborations between countries (Australia and the United States), within China, within Africa, and within Australia. The overwhelming sense of the chapters in this volume is that the most compelling evidence of impact of school-university community collaborations in rural places emanates from collaborations brokered by schools-communities to which universities bring pertinent resources.

The service-learning field is 50 years old in the United States. Much has been developed over that time in the fields of K-12 schooling, higher education, and community organizations. People who have been involved in the movement have worked individually and collaboratively to include servicelearning as an effective pedagogy and program in educational settings. They have created opportunities for students, teachers, faculty, and community members to learn about academic content and personal commitment to serving others for social change and community impact. In this book we hear from individuals who have been involved in the effort for more than 30 or 40 years about what they have learned from their experiences and what wisdom they can share with others who will be involved for the next several decades. Their experience, insight, and understanding will hopefully help younger people to improve and expand on the movement and place service-learning and community engagement as a regular part of American education. “Robert Shumer has been a stalwart of the service learning movement for decades. He's a practitioner, a researcher, an experimenter. This book gives valuable perspective for all of us going forward.” ~ Paul Loeb, Author of Soul of a Citizen “At a moment when many are asking how higher education can better serve our democracy, Robert Shumer's book reminds us that we still have much to learn from those who built the movement for community engagement through service learning. As befits the field, the chapters in this book derive wisdom from experience and, in so doing, give us insight and inspiration for identifying the way forward.” ~ Andrew J. Seligsohn, President, Campus Compact “This book provides a strong foundation for promoting discussions on how the service-learning movement has evolved over the past 30-40 years. Rob Shumer has pulled together several key leaders in the service-learning movement to share their stories and experiences. This book will be useful to a younger generation of service-learning practitioners and faculty who will continue to build the field that these pioneers so generously cultivated.” ~ Elaine K. Ikeda, Ph.D. Executive Director, California Campus Compact

This volume explores the impact of research‐practice partnerships in education (broadly conceived) on communities in which such partnerships operate. By invitation, some of the partnerships celebrated in this volume are firmly established, while others are more embryonic; some directly engage community members, while others are nurtured in and by supportive communities. Collectively, however, the eleven chapters constitute a range of compelling instances of knowledge utilization (knowledge mobilization), and offer a counter‐narrative to the stereotypical divide between researchers and practitioners. Educational researchers and educational practitioners reside in and are both politically supported and socially sustained by their local communities. The nesting of researchers'and practitioners'collaborative decision‐making and action in the financial, social, organizational, and political contexts of the community—together with the intended and unintended outcomes of those decisions and actions—speaks to the essence of community impact in the context of this volume.

The purpose of this book is to compile and publicize the best current thinking about training and professional development for youth workers. School age youth spend far more of their time outside of school than inside of school. The United States boasts a rich and vibrant ecosystem of Out‐of‐School Time programs and funders, ranging from grassroots neighborhood centers to national Boys and Girls Clubs. The research community, too, has produced some scientific consensus about defining features of high quality youth development settings and the importance of after‐school and informal programs for youth. But we know far less about the people who provide support, guidance, and mentoring to youth in these settings. What do youth workers do? What kinds of training, certification, and job security do they have? Unlike K‐12 classroom teaching, a profession with longstanding – if contested – legitimacy and recognition, “youth work” does not call forth familiar imagery or cultural narratives. Ask someone what a youth worker does and they are just as likely to think you are talking about a young person working at her first job as they are to think you mean a young adult who works with youth. This absence of shared archetypes or mental models is matched by a shortage of policies or professional associations that clearly define youth work and assume responsibility for training and preparation. This is a problem because the functions performed by youth workers outside of school are critical for positive youth development, especially in our current context governed by widening income inequality. The US has seen a decline in social mobility and an increase in income inequality and racial segregation. This places a greater premium on the role of OST programs in supporting access and equity to learning opportunities for children, particularly for those growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Fortunately, in the past decade there has been an emergence of research and policy arguments about the importance of naming, defining, and attending to the profession of youth work. A report released in 2013 by the DC Children and Youth Investment Corporation suggests employment opportunities for youth workers are growing faster than the national average; and as the workforce increases, so will efforts to professionalize it through specialized training and credentials. Our purpose in this volume is to build on that momentum by bringing together the best scholarship and policy ideas – coming from in and outside of higher education – about conceptions of youth work and optimal types of preparation and professional development.

Too often teachers and students doubt their own abilities to forge collective work and dynamic critical learning in the midst of education reform practices that limit their opportunities to do so. This doubt can be heightened for elementary school teachers or even their students who are led to believe that they are not capable of engaging critically with their education and their world. The Problem-Solution Project erases this doubt through merging service-learning, critical pedagogy, and constructivism. This approach to teaching and learning is designed to empower teachers and students while they meet curriculum standards and actively contribute to the transformation of their world. Unique to this collection are the reported experiences of teacher educators who implement Problem-Solution Projects in their courses; preservice teachers'reflections on cohort-driven Problem-Solution Projects; and first-year and veteran teachers stories featuring Problem-Solution Projects initiated by their PK-5 students. Features include: • Describes how Problem-Solution Projects advance service-learning and critical pedagogy. • Discussion of how Problem-Solution Projects build on curriculum standards but resists standardization of implementation and repressive education reforms. • First-hand accounts of teachers implementing Problem-Solution Projects. • Detailed description of the steps and outcomes of doing Problem-Solution Projects with preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and elementary students. • Examples of Problem-Solution Projects across courses, subjects, disciplines, and contexts. Readers will find worthwhile the theoretical connections and the practical applications. Service-learning, urban education, multicultural education and teacher education, teacher preparation practitioners will find this text beneficial. The main audience: teacher educators across disciplines, pre- and in-service teachers working in elementary (PK-5) settings.

The work of school, family and community partnerships is complex and messy and demands a thoughtful and deep investigation. Currently, parent and community involvement does not draw on school reform and educational change literature and conversely the school change literature often ignores the crucial role that communities play in educational reform. This edited volume focuses on structural considerations regarding education and the school communities, school-level and family culture, and the interrelationships between the agency and actions of school personnel, family members, community citizens and students. This book extends the dialogue on school reform by looking at parent and community engagement initiatives as part of the school reform literature. The contributors illustrate the negative impact on students and their education when assumptions made by school personnel regarding the organization of education, the nature of families, and the contributions they should make to their children's education are not challenged.

This volume focuses on family and community connections with education during the high school years. In comparison to the wealth of attention that has been focused on involving parents with schools during the early childhood and elementary school years, less attention has been directed to parents of high school students and fewer educational programs have been developed to forge connections between family, community, students, and educators at the high school level. Researchers have found that family and community have a very significant impact on student achievement and on post secondary attainment despite the considerable decline in parental involvement by high school. Educators know that family and community factors are important for student success in high school while, at the same time, they identify working with families and connecting the curriculum to the community as difficult. Currently, scholars from various fields are involved in conducting research to better understand how schools can best enhance the education of the young through interactions with students'families and communities. Educational practitioners also are pioneering efforts to involve and serve families as well as to connect with communities in order to enrich the educational environment and enlarge opportunities for students, teachers, families, and community members. This volume, which will be of interest to both researchers and educators, reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The contributors were recruited from diverse fields and workplaces. Chapters are organized into two sections to reflect whether the genesis of the work described is from theory and research or from practice and policy. Chapters originating from theory and research address: adolescent development and family involvement; the role of family and community in extracurricular activity participation; and the evolution of trust relationships in school community partnership development. Chapters originating from practice and policy address: transition to high school, using the community as a “text” for learning; career education partnerships with businesses, post secondary institutions, and community organizations; as well as, state policies and programs that support parental involvement in postsecondary planning.

This publication features Hiatt-Michael's research and practice during thirty-four years as Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Psychology, Pepperdine University. The chapters represent a range of her major thoughts on teaching, curriculum and family-community involvement by the author. Her work has broadened the scope and understanding of the commonalities of teaching and curriculum across disciplines and professional work. In addition, she has expanded the concept of the site-based school to include and engage the families and community as well as the students and professional staff. Lastly, she connects research and practice of schooling across continents, noting stages of development in educational practices. The forward presents personal insights to the author's professional growth. A chronological reading of the chapters will reveal the development of a faculty member from early researcher to award-winning author of theory-to-practice material in a given field of study.

Early childhood education has always been an enterprising one. Innovative models that provide connections among the family, community, and school of early childhood will continue to emerge through the years to acknowledge new educational ideologies, new social demands, and new knowledge. The issues addressed in this volume can provide new directions to prepare early childhood scholars, researchers, and practitioners to work as a team in these different settings.

Recipient of AERA Outstanding Contributions Relating Theory to Practice Award: Interpretive Scholarship for 2004

Recipient of AERA Outstanding Contributions Relating Theory to Practice Award: Interpretive Scholarship for 2004 This is the second in a series of monographs by the Family, School, Community Partnership (FSCP) Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. Parent involvement, as one of the eight National Education Goals in 1994, has brought heightened awareness to the importance of connecting educational institutions and their communities. The goal envisions “school partnerships that will increase parent involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.” The U.S. Congress additionally supported this goal in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. This act is the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and strongly promotes schools'active involvement with families and the surrounding community.