Community partners enhance lesson design and classroom experience by integrating real-world community needs, fostering teacher-student role reversal through collaboration with outside experts, encouraging exploration of diverse topics, and inspiring students to see their work beyond the confines of the classroom.
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EMILY USAHA: The community partner connects your project or your work at the school level to what’s happening everywhere else.
FERNANDO VEGA: It’s an opportunity for the expert to come in and present a model of what they do or what they make, and to give a focal point or a sense of focus on where that common intellectual mission is headed.
SUBJECT 1: You can think of community partnerships across two variables, the nature of the relationship and the context for working together.
SUBJECT 2: For some projects, school is the most authentic context for a partnership.
FERNANDO VEGA: One example would be a community partner coming into the class and working alongside students in the classroom in a reciprocal manner, both people giving and learning. Another way that can happen is the same thing– however, in their field, in a different location, which creates quite a bit of engagement, and that expert also being reciprocal, a back-and-forth with the students. Another way is the community expert just coming into the class and offering their expertise, giving a model of what they do or what they make, something for the students to shoot for. In the same sense, you can have a community partnership that involves that direct instruction, that involves the modeling in a different location somewhere in their field.
CORAL: Actually hearing poetry from a real professional poet, and they’ve been showing us how to do feedback on other people’s poems by teaching us how to give feedback on their poems, and we’ll probably give each other the same feedback.
MADDIE: I feel like I gathered more about the performance rather than the actual words, more about the pauses and the negative space within the sentences.
KARI SHELTON: We were really lucky because we were able to meet with an aquarist on Zoom and ask questions of her there to make sure that we had the correct information, and not only that, but that it was accurate to the aquarium.
JAMELLE JONES: It took a lot of sending the drafts over to Sea Life Aquarium. Ms. Julie, she came to visit us. The kids knew, like, oh, Ms. Jones, the quality has to be up there, and I’m like, yes. And so they just took ownership of the project in ways that really can’t happen otherwise.
EMILY USAHA: Community partners are everywhere. They’re your friends. They’re your family. They’re at events.
And so I think just, in conversation, having your project in the back of mind is really helpful. I try to go to a lot of events that I know are relevant to my project or what will be my project.
MICHELLE JACONETTE: They broaden the project experience by being able to provide authentic learning to students, so students can not only see an expert working in a job that they might have one day, but also that they know that their teacher is not the only person with knowledge. And in fact, when we don’t know something, we look for outside help, which models for students that when they don’t know something, they can also look outside of their own scope.
KELSEY PENNINGTON: And that partnership has been hosting kiddos on field trips. And on these field trips, the students get to do some hands-on learning outside in the garden space, some environmental science learning, and they also go into the kitchen and do some hands on cooking experiences and learn nutrition concepts.
FERNANDO VEGA: Community partnerships, connecting to those communities, can be a great opportunity for service learning, to provide something to that community.
JOHN SANTOS: When we think of community partners along these two variables of context and our relationship with our community partners, I think it broadens the different ways that we can kind of involve community partners in our project and in the learning for our students. And what we see on the back end of that is that the outcomes end up being more impactful, more rich learning experiences for our students.
EMILY USAHA: You can live in this bubble of school, but a community partner bursts that bubble and is like, this is what’s happening in the real world.
