American community colleges are typically public 2-year higher education institutions with a history and mission of providing educational access to the people in the communities in which they are located and serve. Nationally community colleges continue to become more diverse, providing increased access especially for the socioeconomically…

In its diverse forms, authentic writing carries the potential to connect literacy practice to an author's 'real world'. While contemporary approaches to authentic writing instruction--advocating writer-centred, intertextual and culturally relevant productions--are most often explored in formal learning contexts like classrooms, this paper seeks to…

Community-academic partnerships are believed to increase the effectiveness and feasibility of action research. While factors facilitating and hindering community-academic partnerships have been identified, their influence on the collaborative process is unknown, especially during community-academic partnership initiation and development. This…

This dissertation was an investigation of how students in two-way bilingual immersion (TWBI) programs construct their bilingual identities inside and outside the school setting, highlighting the unique and multifaceted nature of their language development and cultural identity formation. TWBI programs aim to cultivate bilingualism and biliteracy,…

Background: While the Texas infant mortality rate (IMR) is below the Healthy People 2020 objective (5.7 per 1,000 live births), stark differences in IMR are seen across Texas communities. Health indicators for the state suggest important missed opportunities for improving maternal and infant outcomes. The Healthy Families initiative was a…

Grounded in critical policy theories and democratic conceptions of research, case studies of three community-based organizations, one in Canada and two in the U.S., were analyzed to determine if and how the groups engaged with research in their efforts to influence education policy. The findings demonstrate that the community-based organizations…

In recent reform efforts, school-community partnerships have been touted as a means for promoting student success (Decker, Decker, & Brown 2007; Epstein 2010) and meeting student needs (Hands 2010). Yet, despite any accolades, the motives and results of school-community partnerships are contested. Gary Anderson (1998) points out that…

Proponents of homeownership policies often argue that homeowners participate more actively in community life and civic affairs than renters. Although research suggests higher rates of participation among homeowners, the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship are unclear. On one hand, the locally dependent financial investments homeowners…

A person who is considered deaf-blind is someone who is deaf or hard-of-hearing in combination with a visual impairment or blindness. The range of capabilities and support needs of individuals with deaf-blindness varies substantially from person to person because of differences in the extent of partial vision or hearing, if any, or the presence of…

This study seeks to understand community member participation in and influence over an urban school district's school closure process. Data from interviews with School Board members, district administrators, and community members, as well as district documents and newspaper articles suggest that district administrators limited participation…

Adolescents who live in low-income neighborhoods face numerous unique challenges. Examining their resilience in multiple contexts sheds light on what contributes to the diverse outcomes of these youth. The current study examines how adolescents' reports of structural and experiential neighborhood characteristics buffered the impact of exposure to…

This article presents the story of Wilson College, the only college in the United States where a group of alumnae took the trustees to court over the issue of the announced closing and won the case. The court reversed the trustees' decision on the grounds that the college had failed to seek approval from the court before announcing the change in…

Expanding the sources of leadership in schools has been a reform theme since the mid 1980s. Using exploratory factor analysis and regression, we examine the following questions: (1) How does leadership style affect principals' openness to community involvement? (2) Is a principal's openness to community involvement related to student achievement?…

Children's outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods measured in available data…