Issue Introduction Perspectives on Urban Education Summer 2010 | Page 2

Volume 7, Issue 1 of Perspectives on Urban Education explores partnerships between and among K-12 schools, universities, and community members and organizations. Across the United States, educational reform efforts in urban districts have simultaneously created the necessity and opened up opportunities for collaborations among K-12 institutions, local universities, and community groups, making the discussion of this topic both timely and salient. Two critical characteristics have made relationships among these three groups complex. First, each group occupies different roles within broader conversations about education; second, they are positioned differently with respect to the populations they serve. As a result, it often appears as if K-12 institutions, local universities, and community-based organizations in urban areas have dis-parate priorities and dissimilar and sometimes incongruent objectives. The primary goal of school-university community partnerships is to enhance the opportunities available to all stakeholders in the participating institutions and to do so in such a way that K-12 schools, students, and teachers are situated at the center of these efforts. In this issue of the journal, our authors explore intersections between these distinct groups and the factors that inform their collaborative work. They highlight the paradoxes and tensions that emerge in such partnerships as well as examine how these difficulties get resolved. Finally, the authors articulate the various ways in which the progress and direction of their work is influenced by factors that are internal and external to the field of education. The articles in this issue touch on ways these partnerships have impacted student learning, school climate, and teacher practice, among other topics. Among the feature articles, ARISE to the Challenge: Partnering with Urban Youth to Improve Educational Research and Learning, describes a project based on participatory action research. In this piece, Brown discusses her multi-year work involving university researchers, K-12 students, and pre-service teachers, exploring the disconnect between practice and research and the challenges that surface in this context. Cole's School-Community Partnerships and Community-Based Education: A Case Study of a Novice Program offers an analysis of high school students' engagement with social problems through their placement in local non-profit and social agencies and the course that accompanies this internship program. Cann and De-Meulenaere take a unique approach in their article Forged in the Crucibles of Difference: Building Discordant Communities , using autoethnography to consider what it means to bridge the roles of university educator and high school teacher in a university-school partnership. In Authoring …