Place-Based Engagement on Chicago\u27s Northeast Side

Loyola University Chicago (LUC) is a Jesuit university with a mission to prepare students to “set the world on fire” by promoting justice in the world. Led by its School of Education, LUC has worked to engage this mission in its emerging work with public school partners guided by core principles of mutual benefit among partners, place-based engagement within our communities, and a focus on sustainable relationships. While serving others represents the genotype of our 150-year-old Jesuit university and community and civic engagement represents its phenotype, the last ten years has seen change in the university’s phenotype through dramatic growth in both the strategic approach of its place-based engagement commitments and its direct work among multiple community schools. In 2011, the School of Education engineered a radical overhaul of its teacher preparation program moving from a traditional approach to teacher education that was campus- and text-based to a field-based apprenticeship model (Heineke & Ryan, 2018). To achieve this ambitious project, the School of Education generated and solidified relationships with 20-25 core school partners where field-based learning could take place. Transformation of the teacher preparation program coincided with a comprehensive school-university partnership at a neighborhood-based public high school that currently features more than 20 academic initiatives. In 2016, LUC introduced Schools 2020 to build on this success with five additional public schools. In 2018, LUC began to serve as the Lead Partner Agency (LPA) at six Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Community School Initiatives (CSI) sites. Currently more than 1000 students are served through out-of-school (OST) programs while 100 part-time instructors (LUC faculty and students, school teachers, and community organization staff ) work with students through more than 100 unique program activities. More than $4 million in CPS-CSI funding has been secured through 2024 to support this work. In this article, we seek to present the historical context in which our university-school partnership emerged and has developed, our approaches to and examples of the work, discuss challenges that have surfaced in the work and, finally, describe horizon opportunities for LUC. We argue here for a place-based, mutually beneficial approach to university-school partnerships that places relationships at the center of the work in order to achieve sustainability over time. We believe that relationships based in trust and mutuality throughout and across our institutions lead to powerful outcomes for faculty, teachers, students, and ultimately communities. We argue here that a focus on relationships can lead to organizational and community transformation in ways that transactional operational systems may not

Expert-novice interaction in problematizing a complex environmental science issue using web-based information and analysis tools

Solving complex problems is integral to science. Despite the importance of this type of problem solving, little research has been done on how collaborative teams of expert scientists and teams of informed novices solve problems in environmental science and how experiences of this type affect the novices understandings of the nature of science (NOS) and the novices teaching. This study addresses these questions: (1) how do collaborative teams of scientists with distributed expertise and teams of informed novices with various levels of distributed expertise solve complex environmental science issues using web-based information and information technology (IT) analysis tools? and, (2) how does working in a collaborative scientific team improve informed novices understandings of the nature of authentic scientific inquiry and impact their classroom inquiry products? This study was conducted during Cohort II of the Information Technology in Science project within the Sustainable Coastal Margins scientific group. Over two summers, four environmental scientists from various disciplines led ten science teacher and graduate student participants in learning how each discipline approaches and solves environmental problems. Participants were also instructed about NOS by science educators and designed an inquiry project for use in their classroom. After performing a pilot study of the project, they revised it during the second summer and the entire experience culminated with diverse teams problematizing and solving environmental issues. Data were analyzed using statistical and qualitative techniques. Analysis included evaluation of participants responses to a NOS pre- and posttest, their inquiry projects, interviews, and final projects. Results indicate that scientists with distributed expertise approach solving environmental problems differently depending on their backgrounds, but that informed novice and expert teams used similar problem-solving processes and had similar difficulties. As a result of the project, I developed a model of distributed group problem solving for environmental science. Participants understandings of NOS improved and matured after instruction and experience working with scientists. The level of most instructional products was Âguided inquiry. The implications are that working with scientists along with direct NOS instruction is beneficial for teachers and science graduate students for their understanding of scientific problem solving, but that much more work needs to be done to achieve authentic inquiry in science classrooms at both secondary and post-secondary levels