This symposium explores and examines the challenges and opportunities of building community-university collaborations in marginalized urban areas. The selection of short essays highlights different experiences of building and sustaining community-university partnerships in a variety of cities as vehicles for enhancing experiential learning in…

This article describes a collaborative and emergent approach utilizing Tupac Shakur's "Brenda's Got a Baby" to leverage theory education. This song/video uses a fictionalized account of a pregnant 12-year-old African American girl to chronicle the ecological realities of life in the inner city (e.g., teen pregnancy, drug addiction and…

The article draws on work in Critical Geography Studies and Photovoice methodology, to illustrate the ways in which youth in an inner city conceptualize neighborhoods and public spaces. We utilize youth's photographs, narratives, and maps to tell a story of youth's lived experiences and argue that these experiences are vital sources of knowledge…

This paper assesses the experience of undergraduate students using mobile devices and a commercial application, iSurvey, to conduct a neighborhood survey. Mobile devices offer benefits for enhancing student learning and engagement. This field exercise created the opportunity for classroom discussions on the practicalities of urban research, the…

This paper provides the conceptual foundations for a study funded by the Australian Research Council and industry partners Yooralla and Jewish Care titled "Understanding 'encounter' as a dimension of social inclusion for people with intellectual disability." Since the early 1980s, disability policy has envisioned the social inclusion of people…

This paper contributes to understanding why curriculum design in a discipline with a horizontal knowledge structure is difficult, time-consuming and contested. A previous paper on the same case study in one sociology department reported that students who had completed the general sociology major found it lacking in coherence. To illustrate the…

The urban scholar Jane Jacobs once described city life as "the ballet of the streets." In more than a quarter century of joint teaching, the authors have used Jacobs' metaphor to help their students understand that cities are living organisms created and maintained, for good or ill, by the people who live and work in them. At heart their…

Film as a tool for learning offers considerable opportunity for enhancing student understanding. This paper reflects on the experiences of a project that required students to make a short film demonstrating their practical understanding of qualitative methods. In the psychogeographical tradition, students were asked to "drift" across the…

Located two miles from Dublin Airport, Ballymun was built (1966-9) to accommodate people displaced from the inner-city slums dramatised in Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy. "The Stage and the City" draws on the author's research project at Trinity College Dublin, on Theatre and Urban Regeneration. Specifically, it situates Dermot Bolger's…

In this article, the authors' intent is to focus in on one elementary teacher education program and, specifically, on the ways in which that program has grappled with and continues to grapple with the questions of whether and how teacher education works relative to the claim that this is a program committed to social justice and designed to…

This narrative outlines the process of how an independent liberal arts college integrated coursework and learning experiences focused on urban school teacher preparation with an existing university program in Urban Studies. Programmatic changes and additions to teacher education programs at independent liberal arts colleges are often very…

Reviews the historical context of core journal lists, current uses in collection assessment, and existing methodologies for creating lists. Outlines two next generation core list projects developing new methodologies and integrating novel information/data sources to improve precision: a national-level core psychology list and the other a local…

This article examines the opportunities and limitations presented by organizing an undergraduate field research methods class as a policy think tank working for a government client. Organized as such, the course had both the learning objectives of a traditional undergraduate methods class and the corporate objectives of a policy think tank (i.e.,…

Most towns were crucial to the initial colonization and economic development of the Great Plains. Many were, directly or indirectly, creatures of railroad corporate planning, owing their location as well as their physical layout to the townsite companies controlled by railroad officials. This article examines how these facts shaped the fundamental…

Something remarkable is happening in programs of liberal education all over the country. The longstanding notion that learning should occur almost exclusively in classrooms is being amended to give a much more prominent place to various forms of experiential education. The belief that liberal education should focus on a narrow range of…