EDU 513: K-12 Schools and Community Organizations

Overview

Creating a plan for instruction to meet the growing range of student needs increasingly requires concerted action from teachers, parents, schools, and community. You, as a teacher, must play a prominent leadership role in these partnerships.

In this course, you will learn why educational issues require engagement with others in order to make progress and meet student needs. Since these issues take place in a larger community, state and national arena, you will acquire new skills for analyzing the broader context and for assessing its implications for you and your school. You will develop new leadership capacities that can help bring parents and other stakeholders together in constructive ways that lead to more creative solutions and concerted action. The course will provide you with hands-on experience in working with others in a leadership role and help you develop well-conceived plans for collaborative action.

Public education in a democracy brings special responsibilities for you as a teacher. The best way to teach the arts of democracy is by being democratic. Working with others helps fulfill the public purposes of education by putting democracy into practice. Through collaboration, you can effectively engage others in the challenges and responsibilities of public education and help build a healthy and vibrant civic culture in your community.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify and describe the educational challenges you face and determine whether parent and community engagement will be necessary to address them.
• Analyze the larger context in which education takes place in your community and assess its implications for you and your school.
• Identify cultural and power differences in your relationships with parents, students, and community members and apply new skills to address these differences.
• Describe the principles of collaborative engagement and employ them to address educational issues of shared concern by:
  • Engaging parents in student learning.
  • Drawing on external resources, such as community organizations, after-school programs, state and local agencies, and student support services to reinforce instruction and support student development.
  • Engaging the community in the challenges and responsibilities of public education.
• Articulate your role as a teacher in providing collaborative leadership in the school and community.
• Describe the public purposes of education in a democracy and assess the importance of these purposes for the civic health of your community and this country.

Students enrolled in JIU’s School of Education will work with sponsors for their professional synthesizing projects to ensure their work addresses the authentic needs of specific learning communities. It is important for students to identify a sponsor early in the course in order for the sponsor to collaborate with the student on the project. You can read more about the sponsor in the JIU Sponsor Workbook.

Required Texts
EDU 513 texts are available from the JIU/MBS bookstore