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The community school is a human engineering laboratory functioning on a broad basis to help people fulfill their basic needs. The basic academic needs of children and teen‐agers are fulfilled to a large extent within the formal portion of the program. Many other needs are fulfilled within the informal portions of the community school program. Much of the experience in the informal program strengthens performance and accomplishment in the academic areas of learning. Adults participate in many learning activities during the informal portion of the school day and obtain service through the school that helps them fulfill their basic needs. The community school takes the lead in involving children, youth and adults (sometimes separately and sometimes all groups combined) in programs that help to solve community problems. When individual learning needs of all age groups are fulfilled and when through united effort community problems are solved, community development will take place on many fronts.

Schools play an important role in Japan by becoming evacuation centers after disasters. Depending on the nature of disaster, the school can be occupied for several days to several months. Therefore, schools play a crucial role in disaster risk reduction and can contribute to very strong bonding with the local communities. This chapter describes the experiences of six cities with the roles of schools during disasters. Kamaishi, Kesennuma, and Natori, three cities affected by the tsunami, have shown the important role that schools played in the time of disaster. Although some schools were destroyed in these three cities, people spent significant time in other schools as evacuees. Pre-disaster preparedness of schools and communities helped a lot in this regard. Taking the experiences from the East Japan disaster, Saijo, Owase, and Oobu cities in West Japan demonstrated their preparedness for future disaster. The chapter also shows that school-centered disaster preparedness before the disaster leads to an effective role during the disaster and also facilitates post-disaster recovery with schools as the center.

School and community gardens have long histories grounded in social justice. Currently there are advocacy movements calling for gardening programs that foster academics and equity movements through nutrition education, neighborhood green spaces and beautification, and ecological sustainability. While the authors contributed personal experiences and useful resources for those interested in school and community gardening, the authors primarily investigated multiple theories that embraced critical and ecological pedagogies in neighborhoods, schools, urban communities. The democratic movements of food security, removal of food deserts, and socioeconomic sustainability using applicable gardening programs were the driving forces behind this chapter.

A lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) community’s hunger for its history became an arena for creative, unorthodox work involving a library and information science (LIS) educator, librarians and other educators, and even a university library. The result was fundamentally collaborative, involving community and educational organizations; all inspired by social responsibility and community engagement goals, some of which can be found in a university mission statement. The story of these individuals and organizations begins with a drive toward a greater awareness of LGBTQ+ history, a goal that led to creating inclusive high school history curricula. Along the way, these efforts generated information resources such as a community-generated database, a temporary history exhibit, a conference, and a workshop geared to gay straight alliance (GSA) organizations in high schools. GSAs and their statewide supporting organization, the Illinois Safe School Alliance, were also the part of this work. While the larger goal of this work was to help diverse constituencies understand the importance of their history by developing, curating, and utilizing information resources that fulfill overlooked community information needs, this chapter comes to focus on a piece of that work, the development of Illinois’s first LGBTQ+ history elective. Consequently, this chapter can show how librarians and libraries can actualize social justice aims and thereby expand traditional library practices through sustained efforts that may lead to smaller specific goals, some of which may develop in unforeseen ways. The key is to expand the existing aims of libraries into sustained community engagement while remaining open to the opportunities that arise along the way.

In China, a growing awareness that many areas have been left behind during an era characterized by market reform has raised concerns about the impact of community disadvantage on schooling. In this paper, I investigate whether villages exert distinct influences on student achievement. Building on these results, I explore the relationship between student achievement and resources present in the community. Results indicate that children who live in communities with higher levels of economic and social resources have higher mathematics scores, on average.

The indigenous peoples of the Philippines have had to struggle against historical injustices for centuries. They fought against colonization and the subjugation of their cultures and ways of life. Over the decades, their next generations are confronted with exclusion, discrimination, and encroachments on their ancestral domains which have resulted in social and economic disadvantages. An obvious case in point is the lack of sympathetic and affirmative policy directives for the culture-based education of indigenous children and youth. This paper reflects on the policy development processes undertaken to institutionalize inclusion and social justice in indigenous peoples education policies within the K to 12 Basic Education Program. Using the method of narrative inquiry, the stories of reform are told from the point of view of those who facilitated the crafting of these policies. Three narratives demonstrate that contextualized and empowering education strategies and processes transform not only policy but also the policy makers.

School leaders work in a fast-paced job that requires critical decision-making, often without the luxury of time. Additionally, problems may be new and leave school leaders feeling isolated and ill-equipped to adequately address situations. To that end, this study introduced the use of Reddit, a social media platform, to connect school leaders with colleagues who can provide real time support when pressing issues arise.

This mixed methods study used hierarchical regressions, linguistic analysis of online discussions and qualitative analysis of focus group interviews to understand if online collective efficacy led to higher technology acceptance and principal efficacy for school leaders when discussing work-related and sociocultural issues online.

Findings revealed that (1) school leaders build collective efficacy among their peers and are willing to engage more freely in online communities, (2) school leaders are willing to embrace the use of technology if provided time and exposure to such communities and (3) seasoned school leaders are more likely to interact openly with colleagues in online discussions versus their less-experienced peers on how online communities can support school leaders in challenging, ever-changing aspects of their work.

We recommend both school district and educational leadership professional associations consider creating easily accessible online communities as spaces where school leaders have opportunities to engage confidentially with their colleagues over important work-related issues. Future studies should also continue to investigate the impact of school leader online communities through both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

Given the current marginalization of social studies education in schools, this paper explores the social studies centered community-school model of Elsie Ripley Clapp, who was a significant educator, scholar, and leader within progressive education. A former graduate assistant of John Dewey, Clapp put progressive pedagogical ideology into practice in the 1920s and 1930s through her curriculum development and administrative leadership in rural schools such as: the Ballard School in Kentucky and the Arthurdale Schools in West Virginia. She developed a social studies focused, experiential curriculum rooted in her vision of schools as democratic spaces. First, biographical information about Clapp’s life, educational experiences, and commitment to social justice is provided. Second, Clapp’s community school model at the Ballard School is explored. The model, which united people across social class and centered on local history, geography, and economics, provides implications for how we might re-envision our current approaches to social studies education.

Presents a case study of the emergence and early stages of implementation of Queensland Education Department′s policy for devolution of responsibility to State Schools. Has four major purposes: to clarify the rhetoric by which the Department has developed and promoted its devolution policy; critically to examine the efficacy of the policy when it is “played out”, in “reality”, at the “school face”; to explore possible positive outcomes of the policy, potential impediments (within the Department and school community), and prerequisites to effective implementation; and to consider what is needed in pre‐service teacher education to enable future teachers readily to function in a school‐based organizational context. The “message” which emerges from these considerations is that stakeholders at all levels need to be vigilant observers, watching for inconsistencies as they develop, between the rhetoric and the reality of devolution policy in practice – in particular, “regression” towards centralized, bureaucratic control. Proposes an approach to a safeguard mechanism which could be applied at regular intervals. Poses questions at two levels: at the system level and at the level of the community at large.