Citation: | Harkavy, I. (1998). School-community-university partnerships: Their value in linking community building and education reform. Paper presented at the Conference on Connecting Community Building and Education reform: Effective School, Community, University Partnerships, U.S. Department of Education/U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Washington, DC. |
Annotation:
This report describes school-community-university partnerships and their value in linking community building to education reform. The author describes the historic connection between schools and their communities and claims that "successful community building and genuine education reform are intrinsically linked." This connection is rooted in John DeweyÕs emphasis on the school-community-society connection. Realistically, however, community-university relationships range from elite detachment to social responsiveness and connectedness. The author states that, in principle, they are "universal institutions with a general mission of societal improvement and democratic development, which are devoted to the use of reason to help deal with the complexity of our society." Also, universities are one of the only institutions rooted in urban environments. Their lack of mobility creates a significant interconnectedness with the community that surrounds them. The author suggests it would be useful to find new ways of evaluating universitiesÑ"not by the number of articles and books its faculty publish for other scholars, but by the improvements in community life that result from applying what we know to what we do."
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