Jack Leonard – författare

This volume focuses on innovative school-university-community collaborations that are being implemented in rural places in the United States. A foundational belief that underpins the contributions to this volume is that rural communities contain within themselves the resources to promote and sustain vibrant educational endeavors. This belief has inspired a wealth of innovations that collectively offer a countervailing perspective to the view that global competitiveness is the preeminent goal of education, and that this goal is best served by “big education.” Since early last century, there has been a pervasive implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumption that rural places are bereft of the ability to educate children effectively. As repeatedly witnessed in this volume, in collaboration with universities, schools in rural places and the communities that both sustain and rely on them can appropriately configure the educational environment to optimally nurture the intellectual growth of children.

The chapters in this volume are grouped into three parts that explore, in turn, the design features of innovative school-universitycommunity collaborations, some novel approaches to such collaborations, and the contours of parental and community involvement in such collaborations. Chapters discuss both larger scale collaborations that involve many school districts across wide -spread regions, and smaller scale collaborations that involve intensive engagements among the educators and members of smaller communities, and offer theoretical insights into the collaborative process itself. As mentioned above, two narrative threads run through the chapters: that effective collaborations address goals and aspirations expressed by those who are privileged to live in rural America, and that effective collaborations are oriented to building on the strengths inherent in the social fabric of those rural communities.

Following on from the preceding volume in this series that focused on innovation and implementation in the context of school-university-community collaborations in rural places, this volume explores the positive impact of such collaborations in rural places, focusing specifically on the change agency of such collaborations. The relentless demand of urban places in general for the food and resources (e.g., mineral and energy resources) originating in rural places tends to overshadow the impact of the inevitable changes wrought by increasing efficiency in the supply chain. Youth brought-up in rural places tend to gravitate to urban places for higher education and employment, social interaction and cultural affordances, and only some of them return to enrich their places of origin. On one hand, the outcome of the arguable predominance of more populated areas in the national consciousness has been described as “urbanormativity”—a sense that what happens in urban areas is the norm. By implication, rural areas strive to approach the norm. On the other hand, a mythology of rural places as repositories of traditional values, while flattering, fails to take into account the inherent complexities of the rural context.

The chapters in this volume are grouped into four parts—the first three of which explore, in turn, collaborations that target instructional leadership, increase opportunities for underserved people, and target wicked problems. The fourth part consists of four chapters that showcase international perspectives on school-university-community collaborations between countries (Australia and the United States), within China, within Africa, and within Australia. The overwhelming sense of the chapters in this volume is that the most compelling evidence of impact of school-university community collaborations in rural places emanates from collaborations brokered by schools-communities to which universities bring pertinent resources.

Recent crises—whether policy-induced (e.g., family separation at the Mexico/U.S. border) or natural disaster-related (e.g., hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina and wildfires in California)—have galvanized the attention of the U.S. and international public on the plight of children who endure these traumatic events. The sheer enormity of such wrenching events tend to overshadow the trauma endured by many children whose everyday life circumstances fall short of affording them a safe, stable, and nurturing environment.

At the national level, three rounds of data collection spanning January 2008 through April 2014 constituted the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) that—according to Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, and Hambly (2013) in reporting on the 2011 round—assessed “a wide range of childhood victimizations” (pp. 614-615). Among many other findings, Finkelor et al. concluded that “overall, 57.7% of the children and youth had experienced or witnessed at least 1 to 5 aggregate exposures (assaults and bullying, sexual victimization, maltreatment by a caregiver, property victimization, or witnessing victimization) in the year before this survey” (p. 619). According to the recent re-visiting of NatSCEV II by Turner et al. (2017), “almost 1 in 4 children and adolescents ages 5-15 in the United States lived in family environments with only modest levels of safety, stability, and nurturance, while about 1 in 15 had consistently low levels across multiple domains” (p. 8).

Adverse childhood events (ACEs) have both immediate and long-term impacts on children’s health and well-being (Banyard, Hambly, & Grych, 2017; Bowen, Jarrett, Stahl, Forrester, & Valmaggia, 2018; Walker & Walsh, 2015). Children do not shed their entanglement with ACEs at the schoolroom door. To highlight just one study, Jimenez, Wade, Lin, Morrow, & Reichman (2016) conducted a secondary analysis of a national urban birth cohort and found that experiencing ACEs in early childhood was “associated with below-average, teacher-reported academic and literacy skills and [more] behavior problems in kindergarten” (p. 1).

The perspective espoused by this volume is that collaboration among universities, schools, and communities is a crucial element in ensuring the provision of optimal learning environment for both im/migrant children and their parents. Chapter authors share their practice and theorizing regarding the many questions that arise when schools and universities collaborate with communities and build supportive structures to nurture literacy among im/migrant students. Enlightened teaching and culturally aware approaches from teachers engender support and cooperation from parents. Enlightened leadership is a constant thread through all the endeavors that are chronicled by contributors, as are the implications for socially just outcomes of successful implementation of inclusive pedagogies.

Writing about the Children Crossing Borders study which began in 2003, Tobin (2019) asserted that “the social and political upheavals surrounding migration has (sic) put increasing pressure on the ECEC [early childhood education and care] sector to build bridges between the host and newly arrived communities” (p. 2). Tobin recalled that the original grant proposal for the Children Crossing Borders described young migrant children as “the true transnationals, shuttling back and forth daily between the cultures of their home and the ECEC [programs]” (p. 1)—programs staffed by well-intentioned individuals who nevertheless may “lack awareness of im/migrant parents’ preferences for what will happen in their children’s ECEC program” (p. 2). To extrapolate from Tobin’s summary of the findings of Children Crossing Borders, for both the true transnationals (the children) and their parents, “the first and most profound engagement they have with the culture and language of their new host country” (p. 1) may well be mediated by a teacher who is unaware of the intricacies of the community.

Describing global trends in forced displacement in 2019, Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees declared that “we are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon”. At the end of 2019, almost 80 million people had been forced to leave the place they called home “as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order,” according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

This volume presents the concerted efforts of chapter contributors to alleviate the alienation of those who have been displaced and help them to feel at home in the country in which they have sought refuge. Chapter contributors highlight their endeavors specifically with Latino, Hmong, and African immigrants in the United States and Canada, as well as with a veritable united nations of immigrant identities in general. Endeavors oriented to making immigrants feel at home inevitably raise the vexed question of what it means to be a good member of a society—regardless of whether one is a citizen.