Community Organizing for Stronger Schools

In a recent post, But if you teach me to organize, ..., I commented on Ricardo Levins Morales and Reuven Carlyle's encouragement to use community organizing as tools for change. Then, Sally Loughlin recommended an article from the Annenberg Institute "Organized Communities, Stronger Schools: A preview of research findings"  on the value of community organizing for improving student learning outcomes.

Education organizers, researchers, and funders have long debated the impact of community organizing on student educational outcomes. Across multiple data sources, our six-year study found strong and consistent relationships between community organizing and policy and resource decisions, school-level improvements, and student outcomes. Interviews, surveys, and school-level administrative data analyses suggest that organizing helps expand the capacity of urban public schools to support student success by building support for reform alternatives, increasing equity in the distribution of resources, and generating meaningful parent, youth, and community engagement focused on improved student learning.

So, it seems as if we have a win-win opportunity: change and improved learning outcomes. I look forward to reading the new book-length treatment (Oct. 2009) of the issues: Community Organizing for Stronger Schools: Strategies and Successes.

... a richly textured analysis of community organizing for school reform. The authors examine the role of organizing in building social and political capital and improving educational outcomes for students in some of the nation’s most challenged school districts. They delineate the strategic choices and organizational characteristics that foster successful initiatives and consider how community organizing can support increased civic engagement and sustained educational reform. Finally, they discuss the challenges facing this burgeoning field in a new era of American politics.

President Obama has helped us learn where well-developed experience in community organizing can lead.

But if you teach me to organize, ...

Reuven Carlyle, is a member of the Washington State Legislature. He also blogs about his work and perspectives on governing with special reference to support of education. In a recent post in a series on education, on Community organizing for change, he posted an image of a poster about organizing. He did not cite the work or identify the artist. I tracked that information down and tried to add the embed code to a comment so that others can easily find Ricardo Levins Morales and his larger body of work. The Wordpress comment tool did not allow me to add the embed code as the artist's site requests. I add it below to complete the process.

Click on the image to see more work of this artist.

Thanks to Nils Peterson, Gary Brown, and the Diigo Group CTLT and Friends for the reference.

All for Good support

I added the All for Good widget to this blog and to my iGoogle page to support the Obama initiative for a summer-of-service. I wonder whether we can develop the capacity to serve MSAD 75 volunteer opportunities and have them rendered here and on the District's web site.

Google Wave for learning 2

In an earlier post, I described developments in Google Wave that might apply to our situation: Google Wave for learning. Avital Oliver, a mathematician, has extended Wilson's work (and other) and has produced a Wave Emulator that shows how several gadgets can be implemented and used by people who don't have developer access to Google's Wave servers. Oliver describes some of the challenges he discovered in trying to implement the emulator for his task list.

As I started the implementation, I realized that there are certain difficulties with gadget state management with regard to Wave’s real-time concurrency. Here is an attempt to recreate the learning process I went through, with the difficulties I encountered and solutions I put in place to make this gadget work.

It reminds me of our (CTLT and Friends & Morning Reading Group) discussions of working in public. 

Students inspire my professional development

We chose the late start time for iTeam meetings in part because members are engaged in activities that parallel teacher's professional development and collaboration. Brandon has reliably come at 7:30 am nearly every Wednesday since November. Today, we learned quite a bit from each other. 

Initially, he was browsing the workshops page at the "Closing the Gap" conference site. He enjoyed participating in two conferences and wanted to see whether he could find new opportunities to learn and participate. We learned that we missed the deadline for presentation proposals and the conference is held in Minneapolis. So, we used the links tool at the Closing the Gap site to find local connections.

The search produced a link to Maine CITE , the Coordinating Center for Assistive Technologies. The Maine CITE site provided a link to the Maine Accessible Instructional Materials site. And the Maine AIM site provides a link to the AIM Community of Practice. The list of members includes Cynthia Curry, the MLTI specialist interested in AIM and Universal Design. I wonder whether they might be open to having an iTeam member join the community of practice?

Then, he showed me Free Rider 2. It is a game and game creation site that simulates trick riding (dirt bikes, skateboards, wheel chair, ...). He found a particularly challenging course and showed me how to use it. He observed that people must spend tremendous amounts of time to create the tracks they share. I asked him whether he had tried to create any tracks; he had but could not find it. I think he showed it to me because he knows I want to learn how he and friends use technologies. I asked him whether he saw any connections between the game and school. He couldn't think of any. I surprised him by pointing out the games connection to physics and math. I suspect we will see a new round of interest in his work there. I can hardly wait to see where it takes us.