When the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) first released the new Standards for the 21st-Century Learner, controversy arose because many school librarians thought that they were vague and de-emphasized information skill instruction. Many school librarians had trouble visualizing how the program would be applied in their school and…

On April 7, 2009, as the nation agonized over a worsening economy, voters in western Wisconsin's Elk Mound Area School District passed a $9.3 million referendum to upgrade its three aging, overcrowded schools. On that same day, similar referendums in surrounding school districts failed. This article profiles Elk Mound Area School District and…

The concept of Self-managing schools involving local community members, teachers and parents with the formation of School Management Committee is gaining ground in Nepal after the world conference on education for all (WCEFA) held in Jomtien, Thailand in the year 1990. Transferring the management of public schools in the hand of willing community…

In this article, artist, educator, and activist Luis-Genaro Garcia describes the development and impact of the "May Day service learning project" on his advanced painting class in a high school in South Los Angeles. The project emerged from students' interests: their ideas, concerns for their community, socio-political consciousness, and…

Based on a qualitative case study conducted within one Saskatchewan (Canada) rural community, the purpose of this article is to describe the challenges a school council faced when supporting a school improvement plan. The primary data for the study were 35 semi-structured individual interviews conducted with school council members, teachers, and…

Since 2002, community-based participatory research methods have been used by the Calvin College Nursing Department to map out a strategic health plan for three urban, low-income, underserved neighborhoods. Nine focus groups and 449 door-to-door health surveys were completed across the three urban neighborhoods between 2002 and 2004. Neighborhood…

The early years are a foundational time for the establishment of dispositions for learning. This paper draws on a recent study in Aotearoa (New Zealand) to illustrate ways educators have been implementing programs, within mainstream early childhood care and education settings, that inclusively offer Maori perspectives on caring for ourselves,…

It is the responsibility of every early childhood program director to support the development of staff, to ensure that teachers and caregivers have the skills and understanding they need to provide the highest quality of services to children. For Head Start directors, this same responsibility is intensified by federal mandates and a mission…

Western Michigan University is building an innovative program to make welcome those students who were raised in foster care and to help them earn their diplomas without having to shoplift or trespass over the holidays. Many of the students have comfortable apartments on the campus, and a hall was kept open over the holiday break for dorm residents…

Service learning is an educational practice that bridges the gap between academics and the real world. Knowledge generated within educational institutions is offered to a community with the goal of strengthening student learning and increasing students' civic engagement. There is a pedagogical congruence between service learning, civic engagement,…

The use of a dyadic lens to assess and leverage academic and community partners' readiness to conduct community-based participatory research (CBPR) has not been systematically investigated. With a lack of readiness to conduct CBPR, the partnership and its products are vulnerable. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the dimensions…

This article describes a culturally responsive music curriculum through which students and teachers affirmed diverse stories of individuals present in our public school community. An arts-integrated curriculum project helped make learning more meaningful while concurrently creating a safe learning space for students. This grant-funded project…

Urban populations that live in the outskirts of major Latin American cities usually face conditions of vulnerability attached to complex environmental issues, such as the lack of sewerage, floods, pollution and soil and water contamination. This article reports an intervention research programme in Sao Paulo, Brazil that combines a moral education…

Based on quantitative survey data and qualitative data from journal entries by students in a seminar focused on community-based research, undergraduate student perceptions of community partners are explored in the context of debates about the politics of knowledge. Student perceptions that frame community partners as the recipients of academic…

Studying community engagement provides another lens for examining how neoliberal universities collaborate with external organizations to move closer to the market, often in the hope of promoting the public good. This study examined the tension between the public and private aspects of university-community partnerships by studying the impact of…