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Community Law Clinics: Teaching Students, Working with Disadvantaged Communities

ANNA CODY AND BARBARA SCHATZ

in The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice

This chapter describes two different community law clinics and their approaches to clinical legal education, one in the United States and one in Australia. Though only two models of many, they ... More

This chapter describes two different community law clinics and their approaches to clinical legal education, one in the United States and one in Australia. Though only two models of many, they illustrate both the common features of community law clinics around the world and some of the choices and trade-offs they confront in their efforts to help disadvantaged communities. Common features include taking a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to the problems of communities and community organizations, emphasizing the client role in setting the agenda and solving problems, using community legal education to build client capacity, engaging in law reform to address systemic issues, and encouraging critical thinking about the ways law can be used to further social justice. A major challenge is the tension between solving concrete, immediate problems and addressing broader concerns and systemic inequalities.Less

From Community Education to Neighborhood Schools

Andrew R. Highsmith

in Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis

In response to a series of polarizing labor organizing drives sponsored by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s, which culminated in the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937, local industrialist ... More

In response to a series of polarizing labor organizing drives sponsored by the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s, which culminated in the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937, local industrialist Charles Stewart Mott inaugurated a citywide health, recreation, and education program. Under Mott’s leadership, GM executives forged a partnership with the board of education that brought millions of dollars to Flint’s public schools. On the strength of that partnership, the Flint Public Schools pioneered a system of “community education” that hundreds of cities copied during the postwar period. Mott and his chief lieutenant, Frank Manley, envisioned Flint’s community schools as all-purpose civic centers. Open around the clock, Flint’s schools offered hundreds of adult education courses, recreational programs, and health initiatives for youth and adults of all races. However, the Mott program also institutionalized patterns of racial segregation, educational disadvantage, and economic inequality. Foundation officials and members of the board of education repeatedly manipulated school transfer procedures, built new schools in segregated residential areas, and gerrymandered school district boundaries—all in an attempt to maintain policy-driven segregation in local schools and neighborhoods. Consequently, the city’s schools were often even more segregated than the segregated neighborhoods they served.Less

Community Environmental Education

Marianne E. Krasny, Mutizwa Mukute, Olivia M. Aguilar, Mapula Priscilla Masilela, and Lausanne Olvitt

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny (eds)

in Urban Environmental Education Review

This chapter examines the positive impact of community environmental education programs on both communities and the environment. Community environmental education uses environmental learning and ... More

This chapter examines the positive impact of community environmental education programs on both communities and the environment. Community environmental education uses environmental learning and action to foster community wellness in cities and other settings. Social learning encompasses a diversity of learning theories, all of which focus on learning through interaction with others. Two social learning frameworks useful in understanding community environmental education are communities of practice and cultural historical activity theory. The chapter applies community of practice theory to a youth program focusing on water-quality monitoring in the United States and cultural historical activity theory to two programs in South Africa, one involving organic agriculture and the other medical wastes. It highlights lessons that can be drawn from the South African cases and their relevance to community environmental education.Less

Constructing a Community-Based Bill of Rights

GEORGE WILLIAMS

in Protecting Human Rights: Instruments and Institutions

This chapter focuses on the ways in which a bill of rights could be designed to deepen existing respect for human rights within political institutions and the community. It explains that the role of ... More

This chapter focuses on the ways in which a bill of rights could be designed to deepen existing respect for human rights within political institutions and the community. It explains that the role of the community in the rights-protection process is often neglected in favour of a court-based assessment of how particular rights have been interpreted and applied by the judicial sphere of government. It notes that a bill of rights divorced from the community will not achieve its broader aims, including community education and the promotion of respect for difference and tolerance of diversity. It explains that an important way of engaging the community is to ensure that a bill of rights explicitly provides a role for the community in the rights-protection process. This might be in the form of a dialogue about the protection of rights between courts, parliaments, and the people.Less

Radical childhoods and the struggle over education

Jessica Gerrard

in Radical childhoods: Schooling and the struggle for social change

This chapter compares and contrasts across the Socialist Sunday School (SSS) and Black Saturday School (BSS) movements by developing three analytic themes. These themes offer a productive pathway for ... More

This chapter compares and contrasts across the Socialist Sunday School (SSS) and Black Saturday School (BSS) movements by developing three analytic themes. These themes offer a productive pathway for conceptualising and understanding these histories as counter-publics, and for understanding the role of children's education in radical social change. First, I explore the attempt of these movements to challenge wider social inequalities and injustices through children's educational initiatives. In particular, I consider the place of childhood and youth politics in the struggles for social change. Second, the ways in which both of these radical education movements reclaimed past heritage, and asserted present and future capability, is examined. Here, the principal importance of knowledge authority and common culture in the BSS and SSS movements is considered. Third, and last, I reflect on the place of class and blackness as common markers of culture and selfhood in the SSS and BSS movements, and on the importance of developing collective identities in the struggle for social change.Less

The Battle over School Desegregation

Andrew R. Highsmith

in Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis

By the late 1960s, activists in Flint had formally challenged the racial exclusions embedded within community education. However, civil rights groups articulated a critique of de facto segregation ... More

By the late 1960s, activists in Flint had formally challenged the racial exclusions embedded within community education. However, civil rights groups articulated a critique of de facto segregation that proved to be exculpatory for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the school board. Widespread belief in the myth of de facto segregation resulted in a delayed response to the board’s long record of policy-driven segregation. Indeed, Flint activists waited until 1975 to file their first of two unsuccessful lawsuits against the Flint Board of Education. In the absence of judicial remedies, local activists pinned their hopes for school desegregation on open housing and federal enforcement of the 1964 Civil Right Act, which arrived in 1975. Shortly after the federal government ordered the desegregation of Flint’s schools, the Mott Foundation withdrew its support for community education and shifted its financial resources toward the city’s downtown renewal efforts. Nevertheless, the school board continued to champion the neighborhood schools policies that had kept pupils segregated. In the end, board members agreed only to a weak plan that relied upon magnet schools and other forms of voluntary desegregation. As was the case in other cities, Flint’s voluntary desegregation program proved to be unsuccessful.Less

Introduction: the theoretical context of the YEPP approach

Peter Evans and Angelika Krüger

in Youth and community empowerment in Europe: International perspectives

YEPP is based on the historical movements of community development and community education. Both of these approaches are participatory and aim to empower the capacity of citizens to influence ... More

YEPP is based on the historical movements of community development and community education. Both of these approaches are participatory and aim to empower the capacity of citizens to influence directly the conditions that affect their lives. Through partnerships between the public, private and independent sectors and by operationalising YEPP's theory and concept of change, YEPP involves youth and communities in constructing their futures. The complex topic of empowerment is divided into seven domains in an empowerment matrix where change may be expected to take place at both individual and community levels. These are: personal-social; political; economic; cultural; education and training; legal and health and environment. There are 10 key non-negotiable principles that underlie the implementation of YEPP on the ground. These stress: the needs of the community and availability of resources; cross-sectoral partnerships; involvement of local stake-holders in planning, implementation and evaluation; involving young people in decision-making; integrating action with evaluation and feedback; bridging gaps between schools, youth, the community and informal education; investing in the capacities of young people; providing equal opportunities; integrating local and trans-national activities and advocating for new policies.Less

Constitutional Governance

Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim

in A Democratic Constitution for Public Education

Chapter 3 develops the idea of constitutionally-limited local governance of K-12 public education. It describes an alternative to the current school board, the Community Education Council. The ... More

Chapter 3 develops the idea of constitutionally-limited local governance of K-12 public education. It describes an alternative to the current school board, the Community Education Council. The Council's primary mission would be ensuring that every child in the city has at least one and preferably many high quality schooling options. It also shows how the Community Education Council can achieve its mission more effectively if it does not have the power to hire or promote teachers and principals, to set their pay and working conditions, to intervene in personnel actions and internal disputes, or in other ways to undermine school's autonomy and accountability for student results.Less

Educational Ideals of Paul Geheeb and Rabindranath Tagore

Martin Kämpchen

in Indo-German Exchanges in Education: Rabindranath Tagore Meets Paul and Edith Geheeb

The focus of this chapter is on a comparison of the two educational systems—one, Odenwaldschule–Ecole d’Humanité, and second, Rabindranath Tagore’s school in Santiniketan. For both, the most ... More

The focus of this chapter is on a comparison of the two educational systems—one, Odenwaldschule–Ecole d’Humanité, and second, Rabindranath Tagore’s school in Santiniketan. For both, the most important underlying principle was freedom of the students to express and develop themselves. The similarities between the two systems are obvious: emphasis on a natural life, the role of religion, of asceticism, of music and singing, of co-education, of the ritualizing of daily life, and the reverence of the child’s personality. The idea of seva (social service) distinguished Tagore’s school. The importance of manual work and of the crafts has an important place in Geheeb’s school, but not so much in Santiniketan.Less

Sustaining quality of life

Bill Jordan

in Why the Third Way failed: Economics, morality and the origins of the 'Big Society'

This chapter argues that the Third Way's policy goals can be reconciled if a radical new approach is applied to the organisation of services, both commercial and public. Services now supply around 70 ... More

This chapter argues that the Third Way's policy goals can be reconciled if a radical new approach is applied to the organisation of services, both commercial and public. Services now supply around 70 per cent of employment in advanced economies, and they comprise every aspect of economic activity, from the highly rewarded financial services to domestic and personal services such as hairdressing, social care, and cleaning, which are among the lowest-paid occupations. The crucial question is whether moral regulation through cultures of social value, nurturing and shaping the ‘social brains’ of participants, can replace the discredited contractual regulation of Third Way policies on a range of issues in public health, community education, and the physical environment. The discussion argues that the crash has already provided evidence that, given a more favourable organisational context and some additional resources, it can.Less

Social capital transitions of ‘Get Ready For Work’ trainees

Janine Muldoon and Ralph Catts

in Social Capital, Children and Young People: Implications for practice, policy and research

This chapter comprises a case study of 6 young people in Glasgow who enrolled on a course to help them move into employment, further education or training. They had very few peer or adult connections ... More

This chapter comprises a case study of 6 young people in Glasgow who enrolled on a course to help them move into employment, further education or training. They had very few peer or adult connections or access to community networks that provide connection to opportunities for further education, volunteering or jobs. When seeking to encourage the re-engagement of excluded disadvantaged youth, a key worker, who can facilitate bridging social capital processes with community agencies, is crucial to success because, with multiple sources of deprivation, these young people needed joined up connections. A community centre was found to be more likely to be more successful as a first step in re-engagement than an institutional education provider such as a college.Less