ABSTRACT
Although there has been an increase in a commitment to developing universitycommunity partnerships, university lab schools and community-based programs still tend to view themselves as dissimilar worlds, one the “ivory tower” of theory and research and the other the “real world” of education and practice (Bullough, 2005; Stremmel, Hill, & Fu, 2003). In this chapter we address the question:
How can lab schools work together with community-based programs to address and study real-world problems of education and practice? We begin with the supposition that university lab schools are indeed viable venues for developing knowledge that can be applied to problems in the real world (Frank, 1962; Lerner, Jacobs, & Wertlieb, 2005). In particular, we discuss how the Fishback Center for Early Childhood Education at South Dakota State University (SDSU) has made eorts to create partnerships with community schools and agencies to better enable the Brookings, SD community to provide high quality care and education to its children, while supporting research that can illuminate both educational practice and an understanding of children’s development in various contexts. We share some of the diculties and challenges we faced in creating and sustaining university laboratory school-community partnerships, along with the opportunities such partnerships aord.
