A survey of community design centers highlighting ten national programs, such as the Rural Studio and Studio 804 at Kansas State. Includes recommendations for strengthening these initiatives. The work demonstrates that exemplary design is a significant component of effective community development. Since the late 1990s, the National Endowment for the Arts, under the direction of Mark Robbins, has been promoting design excellence through an ambitious series of symposia, best-case design studies, and prototype projects. The results of these programs are now documented in a new series of publications, each focusing on design in the public realm and the potential for innovative architecture, landscape architecture, and planning.

Community members are rarely tapped for their insights on engaged teaching and research, but without these perspectives, it is difficult to create ethical and effective practices. Rewriting Partnerships calls for a radical reorientation to the knowledges of community partners. Emphasizing the voices of community members themselves—the adult literacy learners, secondary students, and youth activists who work with college students—the book introduces Critical Community-Based Epistemologies, a deeply practical approach to knowledge construction that centers the perspectives of marginalized participants. Drawing on interviews with over eighty community members, Rewriting Partnerships features community knowledges in three common types of community-engaged learning: youth working with college students in a writing exchange program, nonprofit staff who serve as clients for student projects, and community members who work with graduate students. Interviewees from each type of partnership offer practical strategies for creating more ethical collaborations, including how programs are built, how projects are introduced to partners, and how graduate students are educated. The book also explores three approaches to partnership design that create space for community voices at the structural level: advisory boards, participatory evaluation, and community grading. Immediately applicable to teachers, researchers, community partners, and administrators involved in community engagement, Rewriting Partnerships offers concrete strategies for creating more community-responsive partnerships at the classroom level as well as at the level of program and research design. But most provocatively, the book challenges common assumptions about who can create knowledge about community-based learning, demonstrating that community partners have the potential to contribute significantly to community engagement scholarship and program decision-making.

This handbook explores two guiding questions – how can university-community partnerships in planning education work, and how can they be transformative? University-community partnerships – often referred to as service-learning or community-engaged teaching and learning – are traditionally based on a collaborative relationship between an academic partner and a community-based partner, in which students from the academic partner work within the community on a project. Transformational approaches to university-community partnerships are approaches that develop and sustain mutually beneficial collaborations where knowledge is co-created and new ways of knowing and doing are discovered. This edited volume examines a variety of university-community partnerships in planning education, from a number of different perspectives, with a focus on transformative models. The authors explore broader theoretical issues, including topics relating to pedagogy, planning theory, and curriculum; along with more practical topics relating to best practices, logistics, institutional support, outcome measures, and the various forms these partnerships can take – all through an array of case studies. The authors, which include academics, professional practitioners, academic practitioners, and students, bring an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge and experience from across the globe – Australia, Canada, Chile, Europe (including Germany, Spain, Slovakia, and Sweden), India, Jamaica, South Korea, and the United States.

Linking the worlds of community development, higher education administration, and urban design, this accessible guidebook offers useful information on how universities and communities can best develop partnership projects. Its focus on smart growth projects further enhances its value for those interested in how urban, suburban, and rural growth can be accommodated while preserving open spaces and quality of life. Partnerships for Smart Growth includes 13 case studies for university-community collaborations on smart growth initiatives. The chapters include geographically diverse locations and urban, suburban, and rural projects. Each case includes a comprehensive discussion of how and why the project was initiated, who was involved, what techniques were employed, what were the pitfalls, and what was the outcome. The result is a book with wide appeal for university administrators, land-use planners and administrators, scholars, and community development experts.

Rethinking School-University Partnerships: A New Way Forward provides educational leaders in K-12 schools and colleges of education with insight, advice, and direction into the task of creating partnerships. In current times, colleges of education and local school districts need each other like never before. School districts struggle with pipeline, recruitment, and retention issues. Colleges of education face declining enrollment and a shifting educational landscape that fundamentally changes the way that teachers are trained and what local school districts expect their teachers to be able to do. It is with these overlapping constraints and converging interests that partnerships emerge as a foundational strategy for strengthening the education of our teachers. With nearly 80 contributors from 16 states (and Jamaica) representing 39 educational institutions, the partnerships described in this book are different from the ways in which colleges of education and school districts have traditionally worked with one another. In the past, these loose relationships centered primarily on student teaching and/or field experience placements. In this arrangement, the relationship was directed towards ensuring that the local schools were amenable to hosting students from the college of education so that the student/candidate could complete the requirements to earn a teaching license. In our view, this paradigm needs to be enlarged and shifted.