This chapter explores the transformative potential of pre-service teachers (PSTs) partnering with community activist organizations (CAOs) as part of their teacher preparation program. Through summer internships with CAOs, PSTs gain insights into community cultural wealth, systemic oppression, and issues facing marginalized communities. This engagement enables PSTs to develop a racial and social justice lens and understand their future students’ strengths and challenges. The chapter presents how these experiences inform curriculum development, leading to community-responsive pedagogy. It highlights enduring understandings PSTs gain from CAO partnerships, emphasizing the wisdom of local communities, collective action, diverse forms of activism, the joy of community engagement, and integration of community issues in curriculum. Policymakers are encouraged to support such partnerships to equip educators for socially just teaching. Further research is suggested to explore long-term impacts and best practices in CAO engagement.

Many, especially school students themselves, would wonder what the connection is between school attendance and personal flourishing. This chapter advocates that students’ flourishing is a major goal of any educational system around the globe, and that the importance of flourishing is rooted more in its psychological – character-wise – aspects and not only in its intellectual aspects. There are many definitions of being in a state of flourishing (e.g., self-confidence, mental and emotional well-being, positive emotions, positive social behavior, cognitive and academic development, curiosity, a sense of meaning and purpose, etc.). The primary claim of this book is that school adjustment is a springboard to personal flourishing and a satisfying life as an adult. Two crucial issues emerge: (a) to what extent school settings enable it and (b) whether teachers’ training programs (e.g., in higher education) devote time, resources, and opportunities to training candidate teachers in supporting school students’ flourishing

In contemporary education, the role of teachers as leaders has gained prominence, particularly within school–university partnerships (SUPs) and professional development schools (PDSs). Teacher leaders play a critical role in improving teaching and learning in schools and in establishing and maintaining partnerships. In this chapter, we explore the multifaceted dimensions of teacher leadership within the context of SUPs and PDSs, including its historical underpinnings and evolving nature. We acknowledge the challenges associated with teacher leadership and assert that teacher leaders in a SUP are essential to a partnership’s success. We discuss the ways in which teacher leadership should, and can, be supported as a professional, impactful and important role in schools. In addition, issues of diversifying the teacher leader workforce and why that is important are also addressed.

Community schools, an equity-oriented reform strategy, has expanded significantly in recent years. To achieve their goals, community schools engage partners that operate outside the traditional K-12 realm. School–University partnerships are one key example of collaboration that have a transformative potential to impact the effectiveness of community schools. While these partnerships hold great potential to advance the vision and mission of community schools, there are also many barriers to the development, sustainability, and growth of meaningful partnerships between universities and community schools. This chapter provides an overview of the community school strategy, outlines both opportunities and challenges in partnerships between universities and community schools, and highlights examples from the field to illustrate some key learnings to establishing sustained partnerships. This chapter aims to contribute to a more open and honest discussions around community school and university partnerships for education equity.

As hybrid spaces for enacted practice, school–university partnerships (S-UPs) are complex systems for leadership and educational change. Therefore, in this chapter I explore various educational leadership theories–from a wide perspective encompassing paradigms, conceptual frameworks, and constructs as described in the literature on educational leadership – and work to identify coherence among the complexity in order to provide guiding principles (from theories) for SUP leadership practice and scholarship. Among the discussions of theory and practice in educational leadership scholarship, tensions and even contradictions are identified when considering enacted practice of educational leaders. Embracing tensions to meet complexity with complexity, I highlight a framework with theories as guideposts for leaders in SUPs to engage and live in a dynamic way to best meet the needs and purposes of SUPs through complexity leadership.

Part VII of the handbook explores funding, policy, and politics as a means to build and sustain school–university partnerships (SUPs). How partnerships evolve over time involves many factors. At the heart of partnership work is a shared vision and commitment to a set of values that support mutually beneficial outcomes. Even with the best of intentions, too often these qualities are not enough to move SUPs beyond an initial stage of development. While these elements are critical to partnership success, it’s important to acknowledge that unless funding, policy, and politics are in place to support SUPs in their efforts, barriers will derail their ability to operate and organize in new ways.

Data on children’s behavior in early childhood can predict the child’s behavior as an adult. Hence, there is an assumption that preliminary evaluation of a child’s skills and other capacities (e.g., behavior at preschool or kindergarten) will predict the child’s ability to adjust to school. Accordingly, efforts are made to measure children’s individual capacities (“human capital”) and use it to evaluate the child’s “personal maturity” and preparedness for the transition to elementary school. Gradually, it has been recognized that attention should be given not only to the child’s capacities but also to the school capacities. This is the essence of measurement and intervention in the domain of “school readiness.” Thus, responsibility for successful adjustment to elementary school is the responsibility of the school and not only a matter of the child’s characteristics. This change also requires a shift from a psychometric assessment that measures children at a certain point of time to an edumetric assessment that pursues evaluation of the child’s capability to meet the required standards assuming that proper measures and activities are undertaken to enable it.

There are several types of school–university partnerships (SUPs) situated within various educational structures with varying missions. However, these SUPs may have many general visions that are more similar than disparate. Regardless of the specific type of SUP, areas of funding, policy, and politics may affect the development and maintenance of these SUPs. The recent and current external funding opportunities that relate to SUPs are discussed. Educational polices of both K-12 and universities related to SUP development are examined. Also, national, state, and local political shifts may have an impact on the SUP development cycle. These issues of funding, policy, and politics also may intersect within the day-to-day implementation of a SUP. Suggestions for aggregating the influence of different types of SUPs to inform policy and dealing with barriers are provided. Understanding the cyclical development of SUPs in response to funding, policy, and political changes in the K-12 or university is discussed

Pre-service teachers (PSTs), particularly those learning to teach in urban contexts unfamiliar to them, can learn a great deal about their students and the issues they face by connecting with the communities where their students and their families reside (Koerner & Abdul-Tawwab, 2006; Zeichner, 2010). Research suggests that working alongside community members in service-oriented organizations can provide opportunities for PSTs to learn about the community’s cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and develop a beginning critical consciousness (Zygmunt et al., 2018). Engaging with the community can help PSTs understand the systemic issues their students and their families face and learn how to build relationships with students’ families as well as support PSTs’ attentiveness to the role of context in their students’ learning (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; McDonald et al., 2011).

As evidenced in the four chapters in Part IV: Leadership in School–University Partnerships, leadership in a multifaceted school–university partnership (SUP) is complicated, complex, and nuanced. As Snow observed in her chapter, SUP leadership is made extremely complex because it is connected to teaching and learning – and humans who “are not logical creatures, but association making creatures who are capable of logic” (Davis & Sumara, 2006, p. 35, as cited in Snow). The chapters illustrate that there are a variety of thoughtful ways to explain, delineate, and describe the nature of SUP leadership. In one chapter, Henning applied design theory to leadership processes during SUP startups while Snow utilized complexity theory frameworks to contextualize ongoing collaborative efforts. Provinzano and Mayger explored the roles of principals who guide collaboration in community school partnerships and Roselle and colleagues analyzed the potential contributions of teacher leaders. Even though the authors come from different perspectives, commonalities – explicit and inferred – emerge from their analysis. This part provides a multitude of ideas that could be explored and unpacked, but three concepts – third spaces, boundary spanners, and brokers – offer important and meaningful ways to describe and understand SUP leadership practices.

In this part, seven individual authors and teams of authors explored inquiry and innovation in school–university partnership (SUP) research. Inquiry is central to professional development schools (PDSs), and has even been dubbed the “signature pedagogy” (Yendol-Hoppey & Franco, 2014) of PDS. Specifically, the authors in this part of the handbook explore the use of inquiry and action research within PDS and SUP research systematically through studying years of scholarly work. Several of them also explore the meaning of innovation in PDS and SUP research – however, as they demonstrate, sometimes this innovation is slow, or not particularly novel. These chapters were grouped together to connect research to innovation, and illustrate potential paths forward for scholars working in this field.

Universities have long collaborated with schools through various school–university partnerships (SUPs). Critiques of SUPs point to their inequitable power dynamics, with the university often prioritizing its own interests over the needs of the school. University-assisted community schools (UACS) seek to counter these critiques by centering the community, practicing deliberative democracy, and producing public scholarship. After briefly reviewing the current literature surrounding SUPs and UACS, this chapter examines the UACS model in the context of the UCLA Community School. Two examples illustrate how the UCLA Community School seeks to create more equitable relationships as a mutualistic school-university partnership. The chapter concludes with implications for policy and practice that support the development and expansion of university-assisted community schools, highlighting how they enhance equitable relationships between schools and universities and also bring together higher education community engagement reforms and the K-12 community schools movement.

In this chapter, our goal was to synthesize research from the last ten years on School–University partnerships that utilized theoretical frameworks. We open the chapter by operationalizing the term theoretical framework and distinguishing it from the term conceptual framework. We then describe our search process for the a priori systematic literature review that we conducted including our search terms. We provide a continuum of theory integration (from low to medium to high integration) that we found within the twenty-four articles we reviewed, and we also describe the various theoretical “families” represented in this review including context-specific teacher preparation and place-based learning, critical theories, post-colonial and decolonizing theories, and sociocultural theories. We conclude the chapter with an emphasis on hope for School–University partnerships.