The focus of the Education Works Personalization Project was to facilitate teams of teacher action researchers whose goal was to personalize their teaching with the support of university partners including doctoral students in education. The subsequent apprentice-like research experience within this university-school partnership provided an opportunity to study the ways in which teacher action research could serve as a vehicle for bridging the culture gap between schools and universities. Both the research team experience and the development of the school-university inquiry/knowledge network were initially characterized by undefined roles accompanied by ambiguous expectations. Although the ambiguity proved difficult initially, those who persisted and engaged in new roles ultimately found these emerging inquiry communities generative and valuable. We have come to conceptualize these generative inquiry communities as third spaces and we describe how oppositional categories framed by the cultural differences between schools and universities can work together to generate new knowledge.

Student sense of belonging or membership in middle-level schools has been given greater importance for its potential to help students become academically engaged. To determine the effect of school socio-economic-status (SES), racial/ethnic status, gender,Jamily structure, and student belonging, a sample of seven teamed and seven non-teamed middle-level schools was analyzed. A total ofl, 052 student responses were analyzed. For the high SES schools (matched pairs in which 1%-10% of the students received free and/or reduced price lunches), no statistically significant effects were obtained for any of the five explanatory variables, or two-way interactions between them. In contrast, in the low SES schools (schools in which 25% to 55% of the students received free and/or reduced price lunches), statistically significant main effects were obtained for student gender, student racial/ethnic group, and school organization. In addition, a significant interaction was obtained between student gender and racial/ethnic group.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract