Cultivating Community Together Study

Employing a “queer intersectional abolitionist framework,” Cultivating Community Together (CCT), is an examination of institutional and community-rooted visions and implementations of school and community collaborations in Philadelphia’s past and present. Nationally, school and community partnership have emerged as important educational reform strategies to address the crushing effects of educational inequality. This project is designed as a form of extended case method (Burawoy, 1998) that twines historical research and qualitative research methods in order to understand the ecosystems of school and community collaboration in their “extralocal and historical context” (p. 4). We hypothesize that the theories of educational change articulated by movements over the last half century in Philadelphia continue to shape the educational landscape. Second, outside of some exceptional examples, contemporary approaches to partnership struggle to optimally effect change due to various factors including design and implementation that minimize authentic collaboration. Through this study, more attention will be brought to the central role Black-led politics has played in educational justice work in Philadelphia, providing researchers, policy makers, educators and community advocates valuable insight into effective policy and practice for U.S. schools.

Citations

Burawoy, M. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 4–33.