Inspired by the 1990 Jomtien World Conference on Education for All and by the experience of non-governmental organisations such as BRAC, Save the Children/USA established a community schools project in southern Mali, working with 777 villages to establish and run their own primary schools between 1992 and 1998. These schools enrolled over 45,000…

C. Wright Mills would be a friendly critic of service learning, acknowledging its benefits for providing students with experiential learning opportunities to connect personal troubles with social issues. Yet he would be critical of service-learning practices that perpetuate institutional power inequalities and that do not advance the social change…

Extension continuously seeks novel and effective approaches to outreach and education. The recent retirement of a longtime content specialist catalyzed members of University of Minnesota Extension's Forestry team to reflect on our instructional capacity (internal and external) and educational design in the realm of maple syrup production. We…

The City of Melbourne's ArtPlay is open to children and young people aged 3-13 years, and provides a wide range of artist-led programs that serve a broad community within and outside the municipality. Its sister facility, Signal, caters for young people 13-22 years. An Australia Council of the Arts funded Creative Community Partnership Initiative,…

This policy brief examines the infrastructure needed to support early education at the Department of Education in the coming years. The Department's newly announced reform agenda will reshape how prekindergarten is managed. It's goal is to help inform the decisions the City must make to integrate an expanding prekindergarten program into Children…

This qualitative study explored the voices of four small, rural high schools in Texas that had successfully minimized the gap in academic achievement of economically disadvantaged students in the 2006-2007 school year. The purpose of this study was to identify the inherent qualities of each identified school through the voice of the local school…

This book was written across a period of intense turmoil and change in higher education in Australia and England. We are deeply unsettled by these changes and wish to open up the discussion about what it means to be an academic and engage in academic work in the 21st century. Accordingly, each of the authors has nominated a theme or lens through…

Since its opening three years ago, Oasis Skateboard Factory (OSF), founded by teacher Craig Morrison, has attracted considerable media exposure and received a Ken Spencer Award from the CEA for its innovative program. OSF is one of three programs offered by Oasis Alternative Secondary School, one of 22 alternative secondary schools of the Toronto…

Complex linguistic, acculturative, and social needs of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners challenge the K-12 education system to develop cultural competence in working with culturally diverse families. This study surveyed 242 self-identified ESL students and their parents from four of Alberta's major school boards. Results of the survey…

The purpose of this study was to develop a substantive theory for community development by school-based agriculture programs through grounded theory methodology. Data for the study included in-depth interviews and field observations from three school-based agriculture programs in three non-metropolitan counties across a Midwestern state. The…

This qualitative study examined the question: How do African-born teachers in U.S. urban schools conceptualize the "teacher" and his/her role and characteristics in an African school context? The data resulted in the conceptualization of the teacher as "the community teacher" who is intimately invested and integrated into the community,…

This article covers the importance of creating and developing agency in community partners when engaging in community-based learning. Often when faculty incorporate service- or community-based learning into their classes, we measure the "learning" part but not the "service" or "community." Focusing more on the latter involves working "with"…

This preliminary ethnographic investigation focused on how Indigenous traditional wisdom can be incorporated into school science and what students learned as a result. Participants included community elders and knowledge keepers, as well as 4th grade (10-year-old) students, all of Amis ancestry, an Indigenous tribe in Taiwan. The students'…

This article offers an extended treatment of two social justice efforts in a rural university town as historical examples of civic engagement with contemporary implications for Writing Democracy and similar projects. The article begins with an analysis of local activism initiated by John Carlos in 1967 while he was still a student at our…

Supported by a growing body of research, the idea that schools have an essential role to play in local community cohesion and development has gained currency among urban and rural school advocates alike. Yet moving theory into action often grinds to a halt in the face of a recalcitrant bureaucracy. To understand why, it is important to step back…