This chapter is a case study of one institution's effort to institutionalize a process through which student development is promoted through active engagement with the community.

Australia is indicative of a country that is deeply confused and conflicted around a policy discourse of inclusion that is sutured within an existential context heavily committed to the tenets of neoliberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of higher education, in which the proportion of young people from backgrounds of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of knowledge transfer partnership (KTP)as a means for universities to generate and exchange knowledge to foster sustainable cities and societies. Design/methodology/approach: This paper reports on a series of separate yet interrelated KTPs between a university and the local authority in the…

The "Ten Tonne Plan" is a greenhouse gas emissions reduction initiative that aimed to reduce school emissions by 10 tonnes (metric tons) in one year. A case study was conducted on the impact of this initiative at a primary school in Western Australia. Research investigated student, staff, parent, and community partner perceptions…

The Authors@UF program series emerged to showcase the scholarship and creativity of faculty, creating an intellectual forum within the academic library, and providing informal, extra-curriculum, academic engagement between students and faculty outside the classroom. This article identifies steps to launch an author program, and considerations in…

Researchers and policy makers have established that family involvement is related to student academic performance. Family participation at a school in a southern state in the United States was declining after the third grade level, and educators at the school needed more information to address this problem. Self-efficacy and ecological theories of…

Schools face increasing demands to support the mental health needs of students and families; some estimate that 80 percent of students receive mental health services at school. Thus, schools face two daunting challenges: (1) to provide effective mental health support to students and (2) to address how mental health needs affect other students,…

The most pressing social problems facing humanity in the 21st century are what systems theorist Russell Ackoff referred to as "messes"--complex dynamic systems of problems that interact and reinforce each other over time. In this article, the authors argue that the lack of progress in managing messes is in part due to the predominance of…

Effective partnerships for education reform "require that schools view parents and communities not simply as customers or clients but as partners in the educational process" (Sanders, 2009, p. 1695). In 2012, seven Seattle area school districts and the Puget Sound Educational Service District (the PSESD) were awarded funding for the Road…

Cross-sector cradle-to-career initiatives are increasingly central to communities' strategies to support children and youth. StriveTogether Cradle to Career Civic Infrastructure provides a framework for how a community comes together around a vision; improves and builds upon those efforts over time; and invests the community's resources…

This article presents findings from a case study of an adult literacy program. The author conducted this IRB-approved study as part of a three-year, research-based, community-engagement project that partnered the literacy program with a writing center at a large public research university. The author argues that the participatory methods afforded…

This paper describes a community-based after-school tutoring project, where families are participants together with their children. There are 50 family members involved in the project, several have multiple children enrolled, and four families were selected for an in-depth case study. The goals of this mixed method study were to determine why…

Based on data from a longitudinal multiple case study, this article describes how district-level expectations, policies, and practices affected principals' responses to an external reform in two school districts, one urban and one suburban. The specific reform highlighted is a comprehensive family and community engagement approach developed…

A capstone course is often synthetic, bringing together many components of a student's educational background. For this reason, a project-based course in mathematical modeling makes a great capstone, as modeling problems often require a broad collection of mathematical tools for their solution. The addition of a service-learning component can…

This study involves the program evaluation of the "Conversations About Education" pilot, developed as a community collaboration to offer professional development involving participants from a Faculty of Education, local school partners, and community organizations offering programming to Newcomers to Canada. The program sought to provide…