Learning at the Boundaries Reconsidering University-District Partnerships for Educational Change

• Published in: Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning Vol. 1; pp. 365 - 384
• Main Authors: Gomez, Louis M., Biag, Manuelito, Imig, David G.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2020
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Research Practice Partnerships; Young Man; Professional Development; School University Partnerships; Boundary Spanning; Educator Preparation Programs; Tenure Practices; Design Based Implementation Research; Vice Versa; Activity Systems; NICs; Educator Preparation; Improvement Science; Youth Participatory Action Research; Leadership Preparation; Clinical Practice; School Culture Values; Common Language; High Leverage Practices; Migrant Student Leadership Institute; Professional Learning Communities; Successful University School Partnerships; University District Partnerships
• ISBN: 9780415839044; 041583905X; 9780415839051; 0415839041
• DOI: 10.4324/9780203774977-25

Increasingly, school leaders are being asked to reshape their work away from serving as managers toward leaders of learning organizations. Yet school districts struggle to establish top to bottom learning communities, and schools of education have yet to figure out how to nurture leaders with the types of knowledge, skills, and dispositions to build and lead learning communities. In this chapter, we discuss how the task of preparing and supporting today's leaders is foremost a cross-cultural challenge-one that encourages actors in districts, schools, and post-secondary institutions alike to interrogate and redesign traditional norms, structures, and processes to more effectively prepare leaders capable of leading continuous improvement to help all children learn. We analyze the designs, accomplishments, and shortcomings of previous university-district partnerships, and theorize how research-practice partnerships-and in particular networked improvement communities-might offer a more viable organizational approach to shift cultures and encourage meaningful collaboration. We utilize the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Improvement Leadership Education and Development network to investigate how a networked approach can produce program designs and institutional relationships that better foster leaders with the competencies to redress enduring inequities in educational opportunities and outcomes.