For some time now, the arts education community has designed for broader outcomes for youth. These programs intentionally foster not only youth achievements within the arts or academics, but also youth and community thriving--through outcomes such as youth civic engagement, occupational identities, and wellness. In this report, the authors seek to…

Meet4Music (M4M) is a low-threshold community music program based at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria, offering free participatory sessions to people from all social and cultural backgrounds, including students. The program allows attendees to experience an emerging field of music pedagogy and approach current challenges…

The Community of Practice framework has been used theoretically and empirically to describe the diverse ways people learn from one another through social interaction in a variety of specific contexts. To date, most research of this genre has favored investigating the community and domain constructs of the theory over the authentic practice…

The main goal for Science Recreation Workshops (SRWs) is to build communities that create meaningful experiences, while participants engage with science in a practical manner. This triggers processes where acting and knowing go hand-in-hand to involve each person as a whole. This requires physical, intellectual and emotional interaction to…

Since 2005, Examples of Excelencia has been the only national effort recognizing evidence-based programs improving Latino student success in higher education. This year an external selection committee selected 4 programs among our 20 Finalists that stand out for their evidence-based efforts to advance Latino student success in higher education.…

In this chapter, the former and current directors of adult education at the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY) discuss strategies from their shared process of fostering community, student leadership, and empowerment in AAANY's community-based literacy program. Amid the challenges for learners and the program connected to the 2016…

Language planning and policy (LPP), as a field of research, emerged to solve the "problem" of multilingualism in newly independent nation-states. LPP's principal emphasis was the reproduction of one-state, one-language policies. Indigenous languages were systematically erased through top-down, colonial medium-of-instruction policies,…

The Exploring Making Through Mobile Emergent Technologies (EMMET) program sought to disrupt the trajectory from rural high school to factory floor by introducing STEM and computational thinking (STEM+C) skills through mentorship training and hands-on activities involving creative production--often referred to as "making." The program…

Teachers' professional development in Schools as Learning Communities may become a key process for the sustainability and transferability of this model worldwide. Learning Communities (LC) is a community-based project that aims to transform schools through dialogic learning and involves research-grounded schools that implement Successful…

This article describes a project designed to explore how art educators can use "assemblage" to facilitate collaborative learning in their classrooms. It also explores how "assemblage thinking" facilitates collaboration by moving beyond static approaches to artmaking and encouraging students to draw on their own identities to…

There is a growing recognition among researchers and practitioners alike that student-athletes are an "at risk" group of students in higher education today. More specifically, research has identified several specific negative conditions that impact student-athletes and threaten their success in college. Learning communities, on the other…

The authors used the Personal and Social Responsibility Inventory (PSRI), a nationally available campus climate assessment, for this study. The PSRI, which assesses individual students' behavior and perceptions of campus climate related to civic learning in higher education, was developed in 2006 as part of the Core Commitments Initiative of the…

This article examines how new forms of learning and expertise are made to become consequential in changing communities of practice. We build on notions of scale making to understand how particular relations between practices, technologies, and people become meaningful across spatial and temporal trajectories of social action. A key assumption of…

Traditional campus-based teacher education programs, located on college or university campuses, have been criticized for being removed from the "real world" of community life, and a number of programs have moved directly into urban communities in order for preservice teachers to become immersed in the life of the community. This article…

This article outlines a systematic and manageable method for learning community program assessment based on collecting empirical direct measures of student learning. Developed at Texas A&M University--Corpus Christi where all full-time, first-year students are in learning communities, the approach ties integrative assignment design to a rubric…