Better Together: Responsive Community Programming at the U-M Library

In the past seven years, the University of Michigan Library's programming model has evolved to be responsive and reflective of staffing areas of interest and expertise. Our team-based, iterative model enables us to develop responsive exhibits, workshops, experiences, and events in our community. This article explores our experiences in developing this model through the lens of some of our collaborations with the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). Our approach to programming opportunities builds on learning by doing, building deeper, mutually beneficial relationships with other organizations, and continually making sure we are truly developing programming with our audience (our community) in mind. While public and academic libraries often develop distinct sets of services, collections, and expertise to serve their respective communities, successful collaborations can yield interesting opportunities for more effective engagement and programming. Our relationship with AADL has helped us to identify and better understand how we can connect our teaching and research missions with the interests and needs of the broader community in which we are situated.     

The Development of Sport in Museums

Sport as a topic for museum collection, display, and interpretation has gradually developed over the last 100 years. However, until recently, there has been very little discussion or examination of the material culture of sport within the literature. Consequently, there is a misconception that sport in museums is relatively new, little is understood about the role and value of sporting heritage, and sporting collections are rarely used to inform historical study. In turn, the museum sector would benefit from more opportunities to work with sports historians whilst developing and delivering their sporting provision. Therefore, this paper examines the development of sport in museums, explores the current activity being developed in the field including the work of the Sport in Museums Network and the National Sporting Heritage Day, and offers practical information about how partnerships between academics and museum practitioners can be established to create a better understanding of the history and heritage of sport.     

Designs of duty: Using exhibits to build partnerships

Exhibits in academic libraries are drivers for outreach. Many exhibit programs center on national traveling exhibits often because they are well done and already completed. The only input necessary from a host institution is space and a small amount of time to put up the exhibit. Locally made exhibits create a stronger connection to the community, but they are more expensive in terms of time for research and creating the exhibit, and money for printing. The adage “many hands make light work” accurately describes the local exhibit creation process when multiple groups come together. Partnerships between libraries to share exhibit content broaden the Pool of exhibit possibilities and raise awareness of exhibit programs for all partners. In this case, an exhibit at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that focused on veterans and their service-related tattoos was picked up and built upon by Eastern Illinois University. This case study covers multiple libraries, both academic and public, sharing an exhibit about veterans and their tattoos, providing outreach opportunities to veteran and service member populations at all participating libraries     

University–school partnerships: student teachers’ evaluations across nine partnerships in Israel

This article presents and discusses the findings of a study which focused on student teachers’ evaluation of their practice teaching in the context of a university–school partnership model integrated for the first time into the academic programme of a university teacher education department in Israel. A questionnaire was developed to examine the contribution of the major curricular components of the partnership for student teachers’ experience of learning to teach, as evaluated by the student teachers themselves. The questionnaire was delivered to 119 student teachers placed in 9 selected school–university partnerships. The findings of the study underscore the added value of supporting different kinds of mentoring frameworks within university–school partnerships. The international significance of the study is discussed with a focus on implications for emergent tensions, dilemmas and connections between local and global forms of university–school partnerships.     

Disability,Stigma and Otherness: Perspectives of Parents and Teachers

This qualitative study explored the perspectives of parents and teachers in the US with regard to the meaning and implications of disability in the context of schoolling, and of raising a child with a disability. The findings revealed broad conceptual differences in the perspectives of these two groups. Teachers’ beliefs were generally consistent with medical model perspectives on disability as biologically defined. Parents’ interpretations, more aligned with a sociocultural paradigm, were situated in the cultural meanings ascribed to disability and linked with issues of stigma, marginalisation and access. The findings also revealed the existence of master narratives on families of children with disabilities, entrenched in assumptions of pathological functioning and negative outcomes among these families. Implications for professional–family partnerships in the education of students with disabilities are discussed.     

Bridging theory and practice: a conceptual framework for consulting organisations

A growing number of organisations are emerging as partners to districts pursuing systemic improvement. Given the critical role a consulting organisation could play in supporting system reform efforts, how does a district leader looking to establish a consulting partnership determine what characteristics in a consulting organisation may be more likely to yield success? This paper utilises an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach for two purposes: (1) to assess whether the quality domains of consultants most prevalent in the literature are consistent with multiple sources of expert knowledge at the point of practice and (2) to determine which, if any, quality domains of consultants are perceived as more important than others for partnership success. Overall, the findings corroborated that the domains identified through the literature are influential to partnership success. While no specific domain or set of domains emerged as most dominant, interpersonal skills and content expertise are foundational indicators that crosscut the other domains.     

Teacher perspectives on partnerships on families of children with autism

The success of students with disabilities in school and community largely relies on productive family professional partnerships (FPPs). The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) recognises the importance of family collaboration to student success by mandating that parents be involved in the Individualised Education Plan (IEP) process as full team members. While several previous studies examined the perspectives of parents of children with disabilities on partnerships with educators, less research exists on teacher perspectives on family professional collaborations. Additionally, there are even fewer studies that focus on teacher perspectives on partnerships with parents of children with autism, a disability category which continues to increase in prevalence. The present study contributes to the literature by examining teacher perspectives on factors that build and hinder positive partnerships with families of children with autism. Researchers surveyed 25 Special Education teachers and conducted additional individual interviews and open-ended questionnaires to examine teachers' first-hand experiences. Findings identified four common themes that educators felt helped and hindered collaborative relationships with families. Study results may lead to the development of specific family professional collaboration strategies that can be implemented and discussed in school districts, teacher trainings, pre-service teacher education programs and family workshops.     

Instructional practices in secondary science: How teachers achieve local and standards-based success

This article reports on analyses of the instructional practices of six middle- and high-school science teachers in the United States who participated in a research-practice partnership that aims to support reform science education goals at scale. All six teachers were well qualified, experienced, and locally successful—respected by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators—but they differed in their success in supporting students' three-dimensional learning. Our goal is to understand how the teachers' instructional practices contributed to their similarities in achieving local success and to differences in enabling students' learning, and to consider the implications of these findings for research-practice partnerships. Data sources included classroom videos supplemented by interviews with teachers and focus students and examples of student work. We also compared students' learning gains by teacher using pre–post assessments that elicited three-dimensional performances. Analyses of classroom videos showed how all six teachers achieved local success—they led effectively managed classrooms, covered the curriculum by teaching almost all unit activities, and assessed students' work in fair and efficient ways. There were important differences, however, in how teachers engaged students in science practices. Teachers in classrooms where students achieved lower learning gains followed a pattern of practice we describe as activity-based teaching, in which students completed investigations and hands-on activities with few opportunities for sensemaking discussions or three-dimensional science performances. Teachers whose students achieved higher learning gains combined the social stability characteristic of local classroom success with more demanding instructional practices associated with scientific sensemaking and cognitive apprenticeship. We conclude with a discussion of implications for research-practice partnerships, highlighting how partnerships need to support all teachers in achieving both local and standards-based success.     

How can a clinical research approach contribute to knowledge-building for the teaching profession?

This article explains what clinical research is and why it is necessary. The term ‘clinical’ refers to an academic way of solving practical problems. Clinical research starts from a view of science that not only acknowledges the value of rational analysis and empirical research, but also acknowledges the need for human skills and connoisseurship. In education, skills and connoisseurship can be developed by being responsibly engaged in classrooms. The (tacit) knowledge acquired in classrooms enables researchers to perceive more relevant factors in practice and enables them to understand the problems of teaching better. Clinical research is a type of action research in the sense that it acknowledges the epistemic function of doing, thus emphasizing the need for integrating scholarship and craftsmanship.     

Considerate,convivial and capacious? Finding a language to capture ethos in ‘creative’ schools

Concepts of school ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ have been widely debated in education since the 1980s. This is partly as a consequence of marketisation, partly because ethos has been identified as a low-cost route to school improvement. Corporate, authoritarian, and most recently ‘military’ models of ethos have been widely promulgated in the UK. Another significant strand of educational thinking, however, has emphasised ethos for and as learning: how schools might prefigure alternative, more socially just, worlds. This article argues that accounting for such divergent notions of ethos demands greater attention to the intellectual resources mobilised in interpreting educational processes. We discuss schools that used their work with the English creative learning programme, Creative Partnerships, to develop what we describe as ‘considerate, convivial and capacious’ school ethos. We aim thereby to value their achievements, provide tools to contest dominant discourses around ethos, and advocate more critical, reflexive approaches to researching school cultures.