In 2006, dairy farmers in the Aorere Catchment of New Zealand began to investigate allegations that they had a pollution problem affecting the viability of the community's shellfish industry. From 2007 to 2010, the New Zealand Landcare Trust's Aorere Catchment Project (ACP) helped farmers engage in actions to improve conditions in their waterways.…

This study explores faculty perceptions of the actions taken by organizational leaders to support the faculty's community engagement. We draw upon Lawrence's (2008) theory of power and agency in organizations to name these strategic actions as episodic power and consider how and why each act taken by organizational leaders mattered to these…

Citizen science, in which volunteers work with professional scientists to conduct research, is expanding due to large online datasets. To plan projects, it is important to understand volunteers' motivations for participating. This paper analyzes results from an online survey of nearly 11000 volunteers in Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy citizen science…

School leaders in highly disadvantaged urban communities across the globe walk a tightrope, caught between the needs of communities and the requirements of national policies. This article aims to enrich our understanding of the potential of school-community relationships. It examines the policy discourse on urban schools and the practice of…

The North Central Comprehensive Center team at McREL International conducted an analysis of current literature regarding student and teacher absenteeism to better conceptualize the problem and highlight successful steps that can be taken to address it. Drawing upon theoretically conceptualized and practically applied strategies for resolving…

Every day in New York City, between 90,000 and 100,000 young people, almost all of them Black and Latina/o, must show up to school thirty to forty-five minutes before their first class begins because they attend schools with metal detectors and scanners. School administrators and policymakers have accepted this scenario as part of Black and…

The purpose of this mixed-methods case study was to examine the dynamic of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (Gay, 2010) among nine secondary agriculture teachers in ethnically diverse schools. By reviewing the diversity of student enrollment in the agriculture programs, the participants were separated by two groups: diverse and non-diverse. A hybrid…

Research suggests that a majority of elementary school teachers do not feel confident in their ability to teach English language learners. Moreover, teachers and teacher candidates are often presented as a monolithic group of middle-class, monolingual women with relatively few experiences with people from diverse backgrounds. Accordingly, this…

Written in an accessible style by highly respected scholars, the papers in this volume document and analyze particular components of the Children First reforms, including governance, community engagement, finance, accountability, and instruction. The education reforms in New York City's public schools begun under the administration of Mayor…

This paper provides the conceptual foundations for a study funded by the Australian Research Council and industry partners Yooralla and Jewish Care titled "Understanding 'encounter' as a dimension of social inclusion for people with intellectual disability." Since the early 1980s, disability policy has envisioned the social inclusion of people…

This paper details how African-American boys' club workers, their Clubs as well as their service to African-American youth, gained legitimacy within the Boys' Club Federation, now Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). Specifically, it illustrates what facilitated a predominantly urban, northeastern organization to begin opening Clubs for…

A case study of a graduate-level community literacy seminar that involved a tutoring project with adult digital literacy learners, this essay illustrates the value of community outreach and service-learning for graduate students in writing studies. Presenting multiple perspectives through critical reflection, student authors describe how their…

Improving all aspects of the quality of education is dependent on preparing teachers to become critical citizens. The social reconstructionist approach to teacher education is essential to transforming an education system defined by inequity, issues of quality, and issues of access. How do pre-service teachers perceive the mission of quality…

Factors associated with the well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth were qualitatively examined to better understand how these factors are experienced from the youths' perspectives. Largely recruited from LGBTQ youth groups, 68 youth participated in focus groups (n = 63) or individual interviews (n =…

Cloudworks (Cloudworks.ac.uk) is a social networking site designed for sharing, finding and discussing learning and teaching ideas and experiences. Design and development of the site has been based on an iterative analysis, development and implementation approach, underpinned by ongoing research and evaluation. To this end, we have been seeking to…