Community members and staff at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Learning Exchange collectively created a theatre piece, based on stories from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES), entitled "Voices UP!" This article examines the impact this project had on four DTES community members who took part in the collective creation…

This exploratory case study examined the affordances of singing as a multimodal literacy practice within ensembles that featured art, singing and digital media produced in an intergenerational programme that served a class of kindergarten children and community elders. The programme that was set up by the study in collaboration with a rural school…

The "Beyond Perceptions" collaborative visual art project, an ongoing initiative by the Indianapolis Art Center, provided opportunities for high school students to engage with homeless individuals through partnerships with people and organizations in the community who serve this marginalized group. These experiences challenged…

Family involvement in a child's education is a complex system that extends beyond the presence of partnerships between families, schools, and the community (Epstein, 2011). By measuring families' feelings of connectedness and membership to the school community, this study explores families' motivations for participating in their child's learning…

We report on a phenomenological study of the leadership experiences of six novice, rural public school principals in a midwestern U.S. state. We situated our analysis within existing research on leadership for learning, particularly how novice principals interpreted instructional leadership challenges in the context of rural school leadership. Our…

In this dialogue with Monica Ridgeway and Randy Yerrick's "Whose banner are we waving?: Exploring STEM partnerships for marginalized urban youth," I engage the critical race theory (CRT) tenet of interest convergence. I first expand Derrick Bell's (1980) initial statement of interest convergence with subsequent scholarly work in this…

Homelessness often is accompanied by poverty, stress, and instability. As a result, children and youth in homeless situations frequently must overcome many educational challenges. The McKinney-Vento Act requires local educational agencies (LEAs, hereafter "school districts") to identify children and youth experiencing homelessness, and…

Branding and brand equity, both as theoretical constructs and as a critical part of applied marketing, have received considerable attention in the academic and practitioner literature. Brand equity, generally considered to be the differential in positive brand image and loyalty enjoyed by one brand as compared to that of a lesser known brand, is…

When academics, who occupy a traditional position of power and privilege, engage with community members whose thinking, attitudes, and responses have been shaped by ongoing sociohistorical oppression and disadvantage, democratic participation is not easy to attain. Yet, unless community members feel able to participate freely, the valuable local…

Because educators continue to face challenges when seeking to educate all children, there is a growing recognition that schools must work with communities to maximize their collective educational potential (Murphy, Beck, Crawford, Hodges, & McGauphy, 2001). Although community schools are still in the emergent stages of development, their emphasis…

This paper, based on the results of a small pilot study of a Bengali supplementary school, discusses the features of the school in relation to other studies of supplementary "mother-tongue" schools and goes on to explore the pedagogy of the school, its relationship with other sites and spaces of learning and the implications of these for…

The concept of Funds of Identity (FOI) comes from a theory of learning that emphasizes the importance of recognizing and using students' cultural, linguistic, and personal backgrounds to enhance their educational experiences. FOI is like a "toolbox" of resources that people gather over time. These resources are shaped by historical,…

The University of Southern Maine (USM) designed and implemented an internal Research Cluster Seed Fund competition with the goals of building USM faculty expertise to address industry and community needs, deepening the impact of research through an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems, and leveraging external funding to sustain…

Anthropologist James Clifford published his influential essay "Museums as Contact Zones" in 1997. He explored the aspects and limits of museums as contact zones in the globalized world, and focused on the museum's role in cross-cultural dialogue in the twentieth century. In "A New Tradition: A Reflection on Collaboration and Contact…

The textile industry surged in late nineteenth-century South Carolina, quickly becoming the primary source of revenue and employment in the Northwestern, "Upstate" area of the state. The influx of industry created new job opportunities for Upstate rural farmers and sharecroppers who previously were engaged in agrarian pursuits. In order…