School-Community Partnerships: Using Authentic Contexts to Academically Motivate Students.

Abstract

AbstractThe opportunities school-community partnerships pose for students' learning continue to generate the attention of educational stakeholders. Children learn through a variety of social and educational contexts, and the goals for student academic success are best achieved through the cooperation and support of schools, families, and communities. The purpose of this article is to examine several instructional approaches that use diverse contexts to facilitate students' meaningful learning of academic subject matter: authentic instruction, problem-based learning, and service learning. Building upon the premise of a community of learners, school-community partnerships within each of these approaches are discussed.Key Words: school-community partnerships, authentic instruction, problem-based learning, service learning, motivation, contexts, real world applicationsIntroductionSchool-community partnerships refer to the connections between schools and community individuals and organizations that are created to enhance students' social, emotional, and intellectual development (Sanders, 2006). A central principle to Epstein's theory of overlapping spheres of influence is that goals for student academic success are best achieved through the cooperation and support of schools, families, and communities (Epstein, 2011). In this spirit, there has been a growing interest in school-community partnerships in education (Epstein, 2010a; Faulconer, 2010; Gestwicki, 2013; Sanders, 2006, 2008; Sheldon, 2007). In this article, we propose that engaging students in activities that are consistent with environmental and sociocultural structures existing outside school walls will ensure a greater degree of parallel between school environments and real-life tasks that will facilitate students' meaningful learning of academic subject matter. These efforts will hopefully begin to address the commonly reported concern by educators that students, especially older students, do not see the meaningfulness in much of the academic subject matter they are exposed to in school. Instead, students see many academic tasks in terms of short-term learning necessary to secure a grade and do not grasp the learning's utility in the real world beyond the classroom. We discuss three context-based instructional approaches that can be utilized amidst school-community partnerships that help students to make meaningful connections between academic content and real-world applications of knowledge: (a) authentic instruction, (b) problem-based learning, and (c) service learning.Social Contexts of LearningCurrent research demonstrates that school-community partnerships lead to many benefits, including creating a caring community, improving the school's programs and climate, supporting families, enhancing student achievement, improving behavior, increasing attendance and graduation rates, and helping students to succeed both in school and in later life (Epstein, 2010a, 2010b). Growing interest in school-community partnerships can also be connected to a rich theoretical tradition in diverse areas of the literature that address the social contexts of learning, including that of situated learning, social constructivism, and learner-centered education.Situated LearningSituated learning or situated cognition proposes that learning and knowledge are situated in physical and social contexts and that the transfer and use of knowledge is affected by the context in which learning took place (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Situated learning's viewpoint suggests that individuals learn by interacting with their environment, and cognition is essentially created through the interactions between learners and situations. The situated learning outlook can provide information about the ways in which the organization of classrooms may affect the opportunities for productive learning (Koran, Willems, & Camp, 2000). Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) argue that students often acquire knowledge in school that is tied to the school context and cannot be used in the context of everyday life. …