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This chapter highlights a College of Education’s revision of required undergraduate courses into service-based initiatives engaging students with their local communities to enact change. These courses include a 20-hour field experience component, where faculty provide education majors with hands-on experiences illustrating the importance of reciprocal community–university partnerships, linking theory and practice, and demonstrating the ways in which students can become engaged citizens. This chapter focuses on the development of one such partnership with a secondary school. In particular, the author discusses two course-specific projects: a mentoring program for students labeled as “at-risk” and a multicultural learning community where future educators taught students in In-School-Suspension (ISS). Both illustrate the importance of utilizing critical multicultural education (CME) and intersectionality as a combined framework for teacher education partnerships, but also for projects in other majors, disciplines, and colleges. This year-long qualitative case study shows that such a foundation can provide a space for all participants to understand cultures other than their own, participate in knowledge construction, and understand their roles and responsibilities in contributing to socially just environments. This is not a one-size-fits all approach to community–university partnership development, but such studies can highlight the challenges and successes faced along the journey.

The essentiality of family involvement in the schooling process is evident from the vast directives embedded within federal mandates, professional standards for teachers and administrators, parent organizations, and advocacy groups. Yet, as explicit as legislative mandates and professional standards are regarding parental rights and involvement, they do not require definitive roles of the family. Several factors influence the lack of a decisive definition regarding the role of the family in the schooling process. Those include the different perspectives on what constitutes a family structurally and functionally, the socio-cultural and political diversity within and among populations, the move to an inclusive education framework, the various terms used to describe parental involvement, the realization that no one family model fits the demographic diversity existing in today’s school districts, and the rights of family members to select their level of involvement. Given the importance of family engagement and student outcomes, three fundamental questions addressed in this chapter are, “How can inclusive schools enhance productive collaborative family engagement networks?” “How can the family be empowered to voluntarily participate within those networks?” and “How can inclusive schools connect with teacher preparation programs to promote the competency of educators for those collaborative family/school engagement networks?” In this chapter we delineate an interactive triad conceptual model with the school as the “connecting agent” to build relationships with families and teacher preparation, setting the stage for productive family engagement as partners in inclusive settings.

Purpose – Latino and African-American children and families in Washington, DC, face difficult circumstances, including high poverty, crime, and teenage pregnancy rates coupled with lower educational attainment. This chapter describes empirically supported approaches to positive development within and between the Latino and African-American communities, highlighting those utilized by CentroNía, a community-based, multicultural learning community in Washington, DC.

Approach – Community psychology promotes strength-focused, evidence-based practices shown to enrich child, family, neighborhood, and societal development among disenfranchised groups. This community psychology framework is used to examine CentroNía's work in support of the Latino and African-American communities of Washington, DC.

Findings – CentroNía espouses many of the tenets of community psychology. Its systematic efforts include the promotion of cultural unity and development, preventive interventions in early childhood and during the after-school hours, and context-enhancing practices at the family, school, and city levels.

Social implications – As the neighborhood of Columbia Heights becomes gentrified and the cost of living increases, Latino and African-American families find it increasingly difficult to remain in the community they have established together over the past 25 years. The consequences for low-income children, youth, and families, along with the evolution of CentroNía in this rapidly changing context, are discussed.

The conceptual framework of Multicultural Hybridism is adopted to reflect the emerging themes of transnationalism and superdiversity in the context of ethnic minority migrant entrepreneurs breaking out of their ethnic enclaves into mainstream economy. It is constructed as an extension of Mixed Embeddedness theory (Kloosterman, 2006), given that ‘Multicultural Hybrid’ (Arrighetti, Daniela Bolzani, & Lasagni, 2014) firms display stronger resilience with a higher survival rate than enclaved businesses (Kloosterman, Rusinovic, & Yeboah, 2016). With further integration of incremental diversification typology (Lassalle & Scott, 2018), the current study adopts Multicultural Hybridism as a lens to explore the opportunity recognition capabilities of transnational, migrant entrepreneurs who are facilitated by the hybridity of opportunity recognition (Lassalle, 2018) from linking host-country and home-country cultures. The hybridity of opportunity recognition focuses on access to markets and resources between transnational ethnic and local multicultural mainstream markets. Through the theoretical lens of Multicultural Hybridism, interviews with 16 Birmingham-based Chinese migrant entrepreneurs have been analysed to shape a dynamic understanding of the multifaceted concept of breakout in a superdiverse and transnational context. The multilayered interpretation of breakout provides an enhanced understanding of the diversity of hybridism between transnational ethnic and local multicultural mainstream markets. This is seen from the perspectives of firm growth and social integration in the current locations and future spaces of transnational migrant entrepreneurs. It goes beyond the narrow imagination of breakout as an economic assimilation process, avoiding the singular conceptualisation of the host-country mainstream market as the only breakout destination for transnational ethnic entrepreneurs.

In schools across the nation, several strategies have proven to yield positive outcomes for multicultural students, especially those with special needs. For example, the responsiveness to intervention program (RTI) was implemented to aid English language learners in California (Boswell, 2005). The RTI program was fueled by the notion that even after implementing the best practices in schools a lot still deserved to be done. Students needed more intervention. Hence, in addition to existing interventions, fourth- and fifth-grade students still struggling spent an extra 45min of instruction with a speech and language pathologist or resource specialist over a nine-week period. As a result of this intervention, these students gained more than a year's growth in reading (Boswell, 2005). Furthermore, after the first year of the program, only 4 of the 63 participating students were referred for special education services. According to Boswell, in 2005, this program received the Golden Bell Award by the California School Board Association. In addition to programs like RTI, another intervention is administering effective mentoring and tutoring programs. Mentor programs have proven to be very successful in decreasing absenteeism and increasing academic achievement in students. Gensemer (2000) noted that peer mentor programs in elementary schools can increase the use of critical thinking skills, improve interpersonal skills, and increase the use of conflict resolution skills. Students learning from each other have proved to be very successful. Barone and Taylor (1996) contended that cross-cultural tutoring enhances students’ self-esteem, academic learning time, and sense of responsibility.