T550-Cultural and Community Forces

Office Hours: By appointment

The best way to reach me is through e-mail as this goes directly to my Blackberry. As I am a school based administrator, E-mails will be answered after 5 pm and within 24 hours of receiving them Monday through Friday. Assignments will be graded within 5 to 10 business days of the due date.  

This course will explore the interconnections between school and community. The term community is used in two senses: 1) a geographical entity, such as a neighborhood; and 2) an ethos or perspective defining the relationships among people. This course considers the idea of community in American thought and how that idea has affected the role that schooling plays. The course also looks at how schools build a sense of community internally, as well as how they interact with the communities that surround and support them. Particular attention will be paid to the notion of partnerships and how partnerships connect schools to businesses, parents, voluntary agencies, faith based institutions, and the larger civil society.

By the end of this course, you will develop a critical perspective on relations between schools and communities by:

• Understanding, explaining and critiquing historical and contemporary ways of thinking about “community,” and relating them to current teaching practice.
• Understanding the ways in which schools are shaped by the communities that surround them, and how schools, in turn, shape those communities.
• Applying the theories, models and concepts of community, family-school-community connections, and school-community partnerships to a school setting.
• Exploring personal/professional experiences with family and community involvement in schooling and identifying the types of family-school-community connections
• The course has two main elements. The first element focuses on conceptual treatments of community and the connections between community and schools; and the second to applications in school and community connections via the community mapping project.

           Grant, Gerald. (1998). The World We Created at Hamilton High. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-96201-X (Paperback edition)

           Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara. (2003). The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers can Learn from Each Other. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-47580-1 (Paperback edition)

Articles posted in haikuLMS

Recommended Text:

                Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. (5^thed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

(All formal writing for this course should conform to the standards of the American Psychological Association, also known as APA Style. If you are unfamiliar or unsure of these standards, you should also acquire a copy of the APA Style Manual.)

Please submit all assignments (saved as 97-2003  Word docs) with the following standard file name:
LastNameFirstInitialAssignment (as listed in the modules)
Examples: SuitECommunityAutobiography.doc, SuitECommunityMappingPartII.doc