By Milbrey McLaughlin & Martin Blank
Experiential, community-based learning requires a reconsidered view of teaching and learning—one that recognizes the prior knowledge of students and the wealth of teaching expertise available in every community. Schools will need to adapt expectations, policies, and practices to allow the community inside the school, and students to go off site during the school day. New instructional methods may have to be adopted, learning during nonschool hours recognized and built upon, and adjustments made in staffing, planning, and scheduling to make new methods work. In order to make sure new approaches take root and grow, every change must be institutionalized in school policies and curricula.
The experience of local community schools and work in the different community-as-text arenas have shown that all of this can be done. With the participation of school districts, teacher education and professional-development programs, policymakers, and the larger community, we can address key issues that will enable many more children to benefit from this important learning strategy.
• Curriculum Development. Numerous national groups already have developed standards-based curricula of this kind, though more work clearly needs to be done. School districts, through their offices of curriculum and instruction, can assist schools by identifying, making available, and supporting the use of such materials. They can also facilitate innovation by providing training opportunities and on-site support that encourages new approaches.
• Professional Development. Clearly, teachers and subject-matter specialists must have the skills to develop high-quality interdisciplinary projects. Preservice teacher education, as well as in-service professional development, can help practitioners understand how to study core concepts in real-world settings and link standards-based competencies to existing community issues and resources.
Principal-preparation programs must ensure that school leaders understand, value, and know how to promote community-as-text learning. The Principal Leadership Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate school of education, for example, teaches community mapping as a way to introduce future principals to the power of community-based learning.
• Policy. Educational policy and practices designed to set standards and increase testing have shed important light on where students are failing, but they have done little to encourage methods that might help. The test-focused, rote instruction seen today in many classrooms threatens to crowd out hands-on experiences and meaningful content—the very things we know motivate students to achieve their best. Carefully designed policy innovations can encourage efforts to seek out community-based learning opportunities as an important contribution to effective learning strategies; make it easier to tap existing funding sources to pay for them; and broaden the kinds of evaluation used to determine student success.
• Community Institutions and Organizations. Public and private community institutions from a variety of sectors—notably higher education and youth development—are reaching out to schools and becoming their partners in strengthening the curriculum. By sharing their own community-as-text strategies in both after-school programs and school settings, they can help school staff members broaden their instructional methods and tap additional resources. Community-based providers of learning-rich content can also describe what they do in standards-based language and show clearly how it supports school-led learning.
For the foreseeable future, schools will continue to be under pressure to improve test scores. To the extent that community organizations, colleges and universities, and civic and cultural institutions highlight how what they offer contributes to school success—by strengthening positive attitudes, motivation, behavior, attendance, and basic achievement—the more formal relations between schools and community partners will be formed, and schools and young people will benefit.
Community-as-text approaches are showing that students can meet challenging standards when they have a personal stake in what they are learning. Their success should remind us that, like Paul, we need to wake up; search for connections between school, community, and curriculum; and help our children find them. Until we do, most of our children—the broad middle—will meet only minimum school standards. The brightest will not achieve what they might, and the failures will be more than we can bear.
