: In this article, I weave practice and theory into a framework for distinguishing between school-community engagement and school-community collaboration , by considering if and how each approach integrates school- and community-based knowledge. I argue that, while school-community engagement efforts build students’ knowledge of or for their communities, school-community collaboration happens when students co-construct knowledge with their communities. Drawing from my own experience as an educator and the academic literature describing school-community partnerships, I offer a brief sketch of each of these three approaches to knowledge-building, in order to spark conversation around the question: How might schools and teachers create more opportunities that transcend school-community engagement and represent true collaboration? the knowledge-building process—as a way of shedding light on the second—the distribution of power. Indeed, participation in formal social institutions and processes, like schools and knowledge generation, is the very foundation of power (Arnstein, 1969). School-community collaboration overlaps with but is distinct from school-community engagement, which, though more popular in academic literature, tends to denote a less critical and equitable approach to knowledge-building and power-sharing. While school-based community engagement strategies might aim to build students’ knowledge of or for their communities, school-community collaboration strategies push students to co-construct knowledge with their communities. This distinction matters because, as Schutz (2006) explains,
Abstract: When exploring the achievement of students with disabilities (SWDs) in today’s educational context of standards-based reform, scholars typically debate the merits and disadvantages of including SWDs in general education classrooms. Yet these debates in the fields of special education, policy implementation, and standards-based reform are largely silent on the inequitable issues of implicit biases (both systemic and individual) against SWDs who also identify as low-income students of color, particularly in urban classrooms, and how these biases may mitigate the effects of inclusion and differentiation. In this commentary, we contribute to these debates by arguing for an equity-oriented reconceptualization of inclusive and differentiation practices in standards-based classrooms.
: Abstract : What is the power of the collective, and how is it practically leveraged in the context of community-based educational research? In this article, members of the STA Community Research Partnership, a literacy focused project that has linked diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities with university researchers for nearly a decade, reflect on these questions. The multiple authors draw upon their identities, experiences, and perspectives as doctoral students, literacy professors, and community based leaders to mine the complexities of participating in an intergenerational collaborative dedicated to the exploration of issues related to educational equity and access. Anchored by critical literacy perspectives and democratic approaches to knowledge production, they ultimately argue that it is within the tensions and foreclosures of holding space for a plurality of perspectives that it is possible to locate the richest advantages—and, indeed, the power— of the collective in educational research and praxis.
