Community partnerships empower charter schools by strengthening their capacity to serve the needs of students, families, and staff through deliberate partnerships with community-based entities. The autonomy that charter schools are afforded uniquely equips them with the flexibility to engage partners and even design schools for which one or more…

We examined the degree to which civic learning activities and civic discussion in the classroom were associated with children's civic engagement in the upper elementary grades. We also explored the types of civic activities used by teachers during middle childhood. Survey data were collected from 359 ethnically and economically diverse 4th-6th…

Mark Van Doren, the noted literary scholar, once remarked, "The college is meaningless without a curriculum, but it is more so when it has one that is meaningless." Many current critics of undergraduate curricula in America assent to the crucial need for programmatic renewal in our colleges and universities. They bemoan the cookie-cutter…

Service learning can be a vehicle to promote democracy in the teacher education classroom. Incorporating service learning into a teacher education program is an uphill battle: teacher candidates lead complicated lives with professional and family responsibilities, some continue long-standing volunteer commitments to their communities, and course…

Civic engagement is the focus of this issue of "Diversity Digest." Concrete examples of institutions that have linked diversity and civic engagement in powerful, effective, and educationally transforming ways are presented. What is seen in the field is encouraging. Articles feature new conceptual frameworks for civic learning, curricular…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]