Universities are crucial to sparking growth and opportunity, by bringing together student populations, research partners, local businesses, and employers to create vibrant communities, jobs, and opportunity across the UK. This series of briefings takes a look at how universities are generating growth and opportunity across the nine regions of…

Summer camps are widespread in many countries and have a long history. Their contribution to children's and young people's leisure and recreation is widely acknowledged, as is their usefulness as an educational resource. That large numbers of children and young people across Europe attend summer camps is well-known; according to Eurofound (2020),…

Community engagement has significant impacts on SBAE teachers' perceived opportunities to remain at their schools or in the profession at large. We wanted to better understand how interactions between teachers and their communities invoked challenge or support, particularly in helping us understand how to retain mobile teachers. Specific to this…

Community colleges play a vital role in providing access to higher educational opportunities for their communities. College completion rates for community colleges, however, have been historically low and few students graduate within a two-year timeframe. Disaggregating these data also reveals significant equity gaps in these outcomes for many…

The quality of the relationship between a university and its host community both reflects and helps determine the effectiveness of the work they jointly pursue. Through the single issue of partnering to reduce college student alcohol misuse, we examined the quality of town-gown relations using a well-established typology grounded in the marriage…

Social work students at a southeastern university piloted a community perception and attachment survey during a local Ciclovia event. Results indicated that a majority of participants held a generally positive view of the community (91%), while perceptions of specific aspects of the community and neighborhoods varied depending on individual items.…

Youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) aspire to participate in a variety of activities after high school, such as attaining paid employment, enrolling in postsecondary education, being involved in their communities, living independently, and building friendships. However, complex and longstanding transition barriers require…

Service learning and community engagement (SLCE) have become near ubiquitous across United States (U.S.) higher education. While much research has demonstrated positive student learning outcomes of SLCE, there has been unequal consideration towards understanding the experiences of communities involved. Because community voices and perspectives…

The author's previous articles for "FORUM," some co-authored with Dr. Andrew Allen, propose a radical restructuring of English schooling to enable more effective engagement with the community and a reassessment of the purposes of schooling. What follow here are a few suggestions that individual schools and academy trusts might take up to…

In the summer of 2020, amidst state-mandated social distancing and protests for racial justice, youth participating in an ongoing YPAR initiative sought to design and facilitate a book club for the residents of their subsidized housing community to increase community awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through interviews, youth shared…

Professionalism in the context of public sector professions is a changing concept, which is subject to different interpretations. The sociologist Julia Evetts has developed two models, occupational and organisational professionalism, which are useful conceptual tools which help us to understand from a wider theoretical perspective the changing…

Community colleges face many challenges post-pandemic in fulfilling their open-access mission while weathering increasing complexities, resource limitations, and overall declining confidence in higher education. Ethical leadership is required for community college leaders seeking to successfully address these challenges. Ethical leadership…

Engagement in scientific discourse is an essential part of becoming a scientist. In this exploratory study, we aim to examine the scientific discourse (and resulting benefits) between undergraduate biology students and professional scientists. We developed a novel method for engaging in scientific discourse, grounded in the theory of legitimate…

Although extracurricular activities are valuable for school communities, they present specific contextual challenges including (a) scheduling outside of school hours/locations, (b) attendees who may not be directly connected to the school community, (c) large groups together in unstructured spaces, (d) potential opportunities for increased access…

The Improvement Network Health and Development Framework (INHD Framework) sets a vision for a complex new organizational form for practical problem solving: the Networked Improvement Community (NIC). One critical test of this idealized framework is to explore its usefulness in describing variation in these deliberatively formed, temporary…