Anchors of the community: community schools in Chicago

In partnership with Chicago's public and private sectors, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has successfully implemented a citywide education reform effort, designed to transform Chicago's neighborhood schools into vibrant centers of the community. Mayor Richard M. Daley and Arne Duncan, CEO of CPS, launched the Community Schools Initiative in January 2002. What started as an idea that was developed by a local foundation has now grown into the largest-scale community school effort in the nation, with sixty-seven schools in operation and a plan to move to one hundred community schools by 2007. This initiative currently involves seventeen private funders, ten technical assistance providers, thirty-four community-based organizations that offer on-site services to children and families, and over three hundred additional community partnerships that provide one-day events such as health fairs and violence prevention workshops.     

Youth using research: learning through social practice, community building, and social change

Traditional teaching runs directly counter to the natural learning process, which is a dynamic, socially conscious process whereby students learn by doing. This educational philosophy and practice is also predicated on serving the community. In the course of helping to build one's community, essential academic and personal skills are developed. This chapter provides examples of a high school program in Boston that uses community action project-based learning as a tool to create a better community. Through this process, students learn about finding and using their power to make change happen for them and their communities.     

Resource-based reflective consultation: accessing client resources through interviews and dialogue

This article presents an interventive, consultative method that is designed to elicit and to promote resource-based language between client families and their therapists. The reflexive interview process that this method entailed is described through case examples. Initially, resource-based language was generated from client interviews and shared in reflective dialogue with their therapists in a way that encouraged participants to consider different views and beliefs about themselves, each other, and their process together. Use of this consultative process in therapy added heightened awareness and respect for competencies possessed not only by the client families but by the therapists as well.     

The meshing of youth development and community building

Practitioners, policymakers, residents, workers, researchers, and even funders have an opportunity to merge their many practices into a more comprehensive and focused approach to change communities substantially. People are affiliated with a number of communities, and not just those with geographical definitions. There are communities based on gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, race, ethnicity, and institutions such as family and school. Building the bridges between youth development and community building and merging their principles and practices will create a force of change. This chapter lays the foundation for meshing the worlds of youth development and community building to make powerful connections that will be important to the community of youth and bring them into wider circles and forces that ultimately will be important to the adult community as well.     

Full-service community schools: cause and outcome of public engagement

Public Education Network (PEN)-a national organization of local education funds (LEFs)-along with individuals working to improve public schools and build citizen support for quality public education, embarked on an initiative to address the academic, enrichment, and social support needs of young people to ensure their success in and out of school. PEN's Schools and Community Initiative called for the active participation of broad constituencies-policymakers, stakeholders, and the public-at-large-to create and implement their common vision for full-service community schools. By engaging broad constituencies across communities, LEFs have been able to build strong relationships between and among community institutions under a common vision.     

Community as text: using the community as a resource for learning in community schools

The community can serve as a resource to help students become more engaged in learning and strengthen connections between schools and community.     

Understanding the functionality of housing-related support services through mapping methods and dialogue

This article describes the experience and process of using community mapping as a tool for collecting data on the functioning of housing-related support services in Metro Vancouver. We outline our mapping methods and discuss strengths and challenges encountered during workshops aimed at understandings how the system of housing-related supports function. Strengths were that workshops provided a forum for social participation and engagement. In addition, mapping is a research tool that enables local knowledge of service functioning and service gaps to be accessed and exchanged. Challenges include ensuring diverse representation; reducing power imbalances; and having adequate space to accommodate interested participants.     

LGBTQQ youth creating change: Developing allies against bullying through performance and dialogue

Research has documented heterosexism and genderism facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) students in schools, especially as it relates to experiencing bullying and harassment. However, little research addresses anti-LGBTQQ bullying interventions, and no research has examined the use of youth-led performance and dialogue in cultivating anti-bullying behaviors among students. The present mixed-methods study assesses one such intervention led by a community-based LGBTQQ and allied youth group. Repeated measures general linear modeling demonstrates a positive impact of this intervention on middle and high school students' likelihood to intervene when witnessing anti-LGBTQQ harassment and confidence to successfully do so, particularly for White students. Qualitative findings demonstrate barriers to intervention and decision-making processes of youth when intervening. Results suggest the importance of these interventions in empowering LGBTQQ youth to effect change in their schools.     

Joining forces: the benefits of integrating schools and community providers

Reforms aimed at expanding learning for low-income children must do more than add hours and days to the school year; they must push beyond the traditional boundaries of school-based learning and find ways to maximize and integrate the assets that cities, districts, and communities can offer. This article reviews research on how schools are using extended learning time to promote student engagement and achievement. A key finding is that successful efforts use partnerships with outside organizations to provide academic support and enrichment activities that build students' skills and connections with an expanded network of supportive adults. The challenge is to ensure that these partnerships are not mere add-ons, designed only to plug extracurricular holes and seen as peripheral to the core academic work of schools. They must be part of a larger system that integrates in-school and out-of-school learning and improves outcomes for youth.     

Enhancing community capacity: Roles of perceived bonding and bridging social capital and public relations in community building

This study examined whether two types of perceived social capital – bonding and bridging – can affect individuals’ belief in community capacity in the context of a corporate community relations program to develop rural areas in South Korea. The results of the study's Web survey showed that perceived community capacity to resolve problems was significantly affected by their perception of both bonding and bridging social capital. The findings suggest that social capital serves as a mechanism that can foster community capacity through norms of interaction, reciprocity, and trust as aspects of civil society.     

Social engineering of community building: Examination of policy process and characteristics of community construction in China

This article briefly introduces the history and major policiesof a massive community construction project launched by thePeople's Republic of China in the mid-1980s. Based on a literaturereview and field observations, the authors highlight four characteristicsof this project: muddling through chaos, top-down control, regulatedparticipation, and community as functional establishment. Itis argued that the goal of the project is not to recreate, inChina, a Western model of civil society, but to restructurethe existing urban administrative structure so that it can adaptto new social demands. By transforming the grassroots neighbourhoodorganization – the residents' committee – into awelfare provider, this project is expected to ease the state'swelfare burden while maintaining its political control.     

Downloading culture: community building in a decentralized file-sharing collective

File-sharing collectives have significantly disrupted models of digital media distribution since their emergence and widespread popularization in the late 1990s. This study investigates how semi-anonymous and decentralized collectives construct their communities of practice. Conducting a case study of a private torrenting community, data were gathered via participant observation, interviews, and online postings (i.e., blogs and forums). Findings challenged dominant notions of opportunism, selfishness and task-oriented individualism advanced by Human–Computer Interaction scholars. Three key constructs were identified in private torrent community building: boundary construction, membership maintenance, and a sense of belonging and solidarity. Findings illustrate how a file-sharing community cultivates the formation of prosocial digital peers, fosters an affective approach to peer-to-peer collectives, and ultimately forges a downloading virtuoso community. This sisyphean, goal-oriented community seeks to create a comprehensive archive of media artifacts independent of and in opposition to dominant corporate platforms. The community demonstrates a downloading culture inspired by technological design, yet driven by trust and solidarity.     

Preparing social workers for ecosocial work practice and community building

ABSTRACT

In the context of the global ecological crisis, the profession of social work is increasingly shifting to embrace an ecosocial lens, recognizing the centrality of the ecological environment for human existence and the inextricable linkages of wellbeing for people and planet. Social work educators are contributing to this shift as leaders in the transformation of their home institutions and communities. We present examples within two models of education for ecosocial work, the infusion model and the integration model. Exemplars are based on the authors’ expertise and contributions to ecosocial work education, community building, and ecosocial change, both locally and globally.     

Middle school reform through data and dialogue. Collaborative evaluation with 17 leadership teams

This report describes a 2-year, longitudinal study of one school district's effort to link site-based, collaborative evaluation with formal, centralized program evaluation. Participants formed a research team in partnership with a local university. Team members assisted leadership teams in identifying issues for informal, site-based assessments and then used the information to monitor progress toward established goals. Participants collaborated in designing and conducting informal assessments of student achievement, school climate and safety, discipline, and parent involvement. Leadership teams used these data in developing their school improvement plans. Researchers and administrators used these data to revise the districtwide survey. At the end of the 2-year cycle, analysis of school improvement plans showed that collaborative evaluation is creating a connection between dialogue and data. These 17 middle schools are approaching school improvement in a more integrated fashion by actively involving key stakeholders (students, parents, and teachers) in the evaluation process.     

Reimagining dialogue in public relations: Bakhtin and open dialogue in the public sphere

Over the past several decades, public relations scholarship has added significant richness to its understanding of dialogue. Such research has followed a theoretical trajectory centered on the “I and Thou” philosophy of Martin Buber. Drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination, this essay puts public relations dialogic scholarship into conversation with the concept of dialogue in a broader societal context. Bakhtin’s work provides additional understanding of public relations’ roles in dialogue, particularly in regards to facilitating public conversations. Bakhtin’s emphasis on contextual and individually generated meanings illuminates the nature and structure of public conversations and the potential for public relations practitioners to play a more active and positive role in the enactment of open dialogue.