The Center’s
work in Collaborative Practice, Research, and Education is situated
within three distinct, yet overlapping, themes:
Housing, land use, school facilities, and transportation shape the nature and quality of public education and must be talked about in relation to schools and educational quality. CC&S investigates issues around:
- Land Use Policies that Support Quality Schools – we
believe that the urban context and the built environment decisions
have important and under-acknowledged impacts on schools and school
quality. Questions around where new schools should be located, student
transportation access, and how proposed urban development and redevelopment
impact schools are essential to improving school quality
- Thinking Outside the Box of Traditional School Facilities – while
public schools have historically been built as large facilities on
large sites, many voices are advocating new schools that break this
traditional mold. Current trends in school facilities include: small
schools and small learning communities; creating joint-use facilities,
developing mixed-use facilities; and siting schools in urban infill
sites. These new visions have different impacts and potentials for
supporting quality schools and healthy communities.
- Coordinating School and Housing Policy – although
not described as such, housing policy inherently is school policy.
Since where families live largely determines their public school choices,
the perception of school quality is a strong factor that drives residential
choice. Therefore, housing development policies for both market and
public housing, need to be evaluated in terms of their impacts on local
educational capacities.
The Center’s work
is grounded in the authenticity of legitimate participation and specifically
addresses the relationship between real-world contexts, pedagogy, and participation – all
as elements in social change. Key elements in this framework include:
- Focus on Community – we must further understand
the ways in which community and social relations can improve schools.
The social context of schools, neighborhoods, and cities includes the
multitude of relationships within school and between schools, students,
families, government, and community members.
- Balance Neighborhood Orientation, School Choice, and Diversity – while
varied policy and rhetoric supports these issues, it is important to
remember that there is a resulting tension that plays out between them.
We must be critical about how one impacts the other and in thinking
of ways to integrate the positive aspects of each into policy.
- Integrate Pedagogy and Community Contexts – although
public schools have their roots in democratic and civic ideals, rarely
does curriculum and pedagogy engage real-world contexts and local communities
for learning purposes. Models for doing so need to be developed and
implemented to improve schools and communities.
To improve both cities
and schools, bridging the institutional and disciplinary barriers
between city planning, education and other related fields is necessary.
The Center addresses governance through research and engaging in collaborative practice, including:
- Breaking Institutional Silos – joint planning
between urban policymakers and educators is hampered by institutional
structures not designed for the task. The Center works to highlight
cases that offer alternatives to traditional silo approaches, and to
reveal points of intersection for institutionalizing joint planning
- Building Civic Capacity for Community and Political Leadership – to
further support joint planning, support for improving schools must
be garnered from and between key institutional and community sectors.
The Center works to identify and understand the relationships between
actors involved and the points at which they take place.
- Educating Across Governmental Sectors – a
key component for joint planning is to break the disciplinary and language
boundaries between the sectors involved, especially between educators
and urban policymakers. For example, affordable housing or smart growth
to an educator is often as opaque as curricular mandates for a housing
expert. Therefore, to break institutional silos, build civic capacity
and impact policy, defining common interests and clarifying policy
intersections is necessary.
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