This report, which focuses on a completed school project in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is one of two case studies focused on new public schools. In partnership with Enterprise Community Partners and their partners in these communities, we explored how two school openings affected access to opportunities for children. The case studies aim to…

With globalization as a focal point in the United States and encouraged in our educational system, the significance of intercultural competence has been amplified. To advance this concept among middle school students, international university students, and the local community, a partnership was formed to offer an international awareness program…

In the context of rising global displacement and the politicization of humanitarian assistance, refugee health disparities are worsening due to trauma, stigma, and limited access to health and social services. Structural oppression, rooted in state policies and dominant nationalist narratives, perpetuates these inequities, which are often…

Many community-academic partnerships are established to conduct meaningful research and practice. Yet, little is written about their sustainability and what does exist suggests that effective partnerships are hard to sustain. In this study, we sought insights into what might support successful, enduring community-academic partnerships focused on…

Background: The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health includes important considerations of environmental context in understanding disability, but the environmental impact is often difficult to measure. Purpose: Demonstrates the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in…

This article recounts our field experience and research in TfD in the Ofabo community, Kogi State, Nigeria. Through socially engaged performance and participant observation, this study finds that the poor state of drinking water in the Ofabo community results from government negligence, inadequate awareness, and the inactivity of community…

In this article, we investigate the community-driven science happening organically in elite athletics as a means of engaging a community of learners--collegiate athletes, many of whom come from underrepresented groups--in STEM. We aim to recognize the data literacy practices inherent in sports play and to explore the potential of "critical…

Governmental policies in the United States and beyond increasingly call for school leaders to involve local communities in decision-making, yet engagement practices have often centered the perspectives of White parents and marginalized the voices of racially minoritized families. In this comparative case study of seven school districts, we draw on…

Service learning is an effective approach to deepen student learning through engagement of action and reflection. This project was structured to benefit students as well as our community partner by addressing a pressing need during the COVID pandemic.

Iowa BIG is a system of high schools located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in the United States which emerged from community rebuilding efforts following catastrophic flooding in the city. The aim of this case study is to highlight Iowa BIG's complexity by describing how it functions as a: (1) school system; (2) vision for student-centric learning; and…

Community engagement programs are shaped by the educators who facilitate them. Due to a curtailed critical consciousness, such programs are not always sensitive to the negative implications for the communities they are attempting to support. Guided by critical ethnographic and interpretive phenomenological analysis, this study examines how…

Learning about how economic well-being--or the lack of well-being--shapes peoples' lives can enhance social work students' and professionals' efforts to "champion social progress powered by science," a stated aim of the Grand Challenges for Social Work. Yet social work and economics have pursued divergent paths since the late 20th…

Steeped in a rich history of formal connections between institutions of higher education and the citizens and communities in which they are embedded, the importance of engaging education in the community has long been recognized for its myriad of benefits to all involved including increased funding for university research, more informed practice…

As educational systems design and build new spaces aimed for learning in the digital age, small group configurations around large screens have become a highly popular spatial feature in classrooms and libraries. In this paper, we introduce the idea of intermediate indexing as occurring in the space between the knot of intertwined resources at the…

In a yearlong ethnographic study, we actively participated as members of the national planning committee for fourteen local climate conferences, we examined how citizen participation was imagined and enacted. We introduce a framework for studying the relationship between cognitive engagement, learning, and civic engagement in the public sphere. We…