Publication: Columbia Spectator
Date: November 28, 2012 Summary: Teachers College has begun to fulfill its pledge of a partnership with 12 Harlem public schools, establishing professional development workshops for teachers and expanding after-school programming for seven schools this semester. Excerpt: "The Partnership Consortium is a wonderful way for Columbia students to learn about the day-to-day life of NYC public schools from a student’s perspective, and not from a professor, or text,” Landis said in an email. “Having this hands-on experience will hopefully bring more qualified, passionate graduates to public schools.” The information garnered from focus groups will “help inform the development of family engagement programming that will be tailored to each specific school setting to address identified barriers to student success,” Michael Laucello, the teaching assistant for Brassard’s class, said in an email." Read the full article on Columbia Spectator. During our eight-year partnership with District 79* (D79), we’ve sent teams of educators, volunteers and visiting artists to work in Horizon Academy at Rikers Island Prison and Community Prep, which serve students that are currently incarcerated or recently released from juvenile detention centers, as well as Bronx Regional High School, which serves recently immigrated English Language Learners (ELLs). This year, we launched Speaking Worlds 3; the third edition to two previous, successful Speaking Worlds book projects. Speaking Worlds 3, like all of the 120 SPI published projects over the past 12 years, shows us the power of an 'authentic', real-world audience—and the promise of a published book—in motivating students to recognize the benefits of strengthening their writing skills. This focus on direct application of skills in a real world context is an area of curricula that, in an assessment-driven era, aims uniquely to engage student-to-community partnerships through authorship and agency. These ‘real world’ ways of working are too often divorced from the writing process in an educational system where the student-writer’s audience is generally an audience of one--the teacher or the test. |
|