Climate change presents a global challenge requiring innovative and collaborative approaches to mitigate its impact. This article explores the intersection of community engagement, infrastructure management, and student involvement in addressing climate change. Engaging communities in decision-making initiatives fosters a sense of shared…

The Community Schools movement is growing across the country and is a non-partisan solution that promotes local decision making to accelerate student success. The Community Schools strategy has evolved as a vehicle for whole-child, whole-family, whole-community prosperity, through intentional school-family-community partnerships. This strategy,…

This critical ethnographic study explores a participatory action research group consisting of Latin American immigrant mothers seeking to involve their community in school decision-making. Drawing from "pedagogies of acompañamiento", I describe how the mothers responded to decision-making challenges and leveraged reflections on their…

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…

The role of school principals in shaping school culture is well recognized, yet barriers often prevent them from effectively influencing this critical aspect of educational leadership. This project investigates the perceptions of elementary principals regarding the barriers and behaviors that influence school culture. Using qualitative research…

This brief emphasizes the importance of including the voices and experiences of students, families, staff, and community partners in educational decision-making processes. It provides five key considerations for schools to effectively engage with their educational partners, such as making authentic connections through listening sessions and…

High-quality early childhood education (ECE) does more than boost kindergarten readiness--it sets the foundation for academic success, workforce participation, and economic mobility. This brief explores how leading global systems--and a few standout U.S. states--are reimagining ECE to expand access to more young learners and ensure alignment with…

This essay offers a framework for broader community involvement as a means of increasing the relevance and usefulness of evidence developed. This essay begins by defining key concepts related to democratizing the development of evidence. The sections that follow outline a logic model that calls for a bidirectional, iterative set of core activities…

The Common Problems Project (CP2) is an interdisciplinary, problem-based pedagogy that was launched in 2015 by four partner colleges in the State University of New York (SUNY) system (Cortland, Oneonta, Oswego, and Plattsburgh). Since its inception, 100 faculty have participated in CP2 and integrated the pedagogy into 134 courses to implement 47…

Background: The author discusses an in-depth study of the participatory budgeting process in Chicago's 49th Ward (PB49), a deliberative democratic process in which all residents and ideas were positioned as equal, relying on rational arguments to make decisions about municipal funding allocations. The study documented collective decision-making…

This study investigated stakeholder engagement practices of Philippine rural and remote schools using a mixed-method research design. This study examined the assessment of 218 school leaders on the extent to which their schools identify, plan, engage, manage, and monitor stakeholders and narratives from 11 participants on how they manage…

For decades, Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) has blatantly disregarded and ostracized Black caregivers and community members who have attempted to address concerns about the educational experience of Black students. The only moderately successful strategy was political activism led by Dr. Barbara Sizemore in the 1970s to secure a board majority,…

This article examines the ways in which teachers and community-based activists collaborated to advance an anti-privatisation agenda within an urban school district. The article emerges from our respective studies of privatisation in Oakland, one a historical study of the advance of neoliberalism and the other a case study (Merriam 2007,…

A persistent issue in Australia, and globally, is how to improve participation rates in higher education for students from regional and rural areas. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by exploring the idea of a Community Embedded University (CEU). We draw on empirical data from three participatory co-design workshops with university students…

Mantua Township is a small rural town located in southern New Jersey, about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia. Students in the township attend one of three neighborhood schools, pre-K through sixth grade. Sewell School educates students in grades pre-K to K, Centre City School educates students in Grades 1 to 3, and J. Mason Tomlin School…