From sarena@u.washington.edu Tue Mar 16 15:59:42 1999 Received: from jason05.u.washington.edu (root@jason05.u.washington.edu [140.142.78.6]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id PAA18852 for ; Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:59:41 -0800 Received: from homer15.u.washington.edu (sarena@homer15.u.washington.edu [140.142.70.16]) by jason05.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id PAA35714 for ; Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:59:39 -0800 Received: from localhost (sarena@localhost) by homer15.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id PAA22924 for ; Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:59:38 -0800 Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:59:38 -0800 (PST) From: Sarena Seifer To: ccp@u.washington.edu Subject: new publication available on K-12/university partnerships Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Dear CCP'ers, "The Public Schools Rewards Project: A Higher Ed Tough One" had as its goal to "make a place" for faculty work with K-12 schools - that is, to prompt colleges and universities to alter their faculty tenure, promotion, and merit criteria to recognize K-16 collaboration as a scholarly act worthy of respect and reward. A new American Association of Higher Education publication, "Making a Place in the Faculty Rewards System for Work with K-12: A Project Report of Four Universities" (1999), recounts the project's context, course and outcomes, both anticipated and actual. Detailed institutional case studies from each campus offer the organizational perspective; 15 personal essays from faculty and administrators active in K-16 work showcase its professional and personal effects. As proposed by AAHE in collaboration with Temple University, the three-year, FIPSE-funded project involved four campuses - Temple University, University of Texas at El Paso, University of Southern Colorado, and california State University Northridge. The campuses would use grant funds to form project teams of faculty, each of which would undertake common but independent activities: to assess the institution's existing policies regarding K-16 work, to target departments hospitable to alternative rewards criteria, to develop and then get the institution to implement the criteria in those departments, and to get additional departments on campus to take up the new personnel policies. The project anticipated that by its third year, its participants would be ready to disseminate their local success by helping other campuses make similar changes in their faculty rewards systems... but things didn't work out as planned. The project achieved some, if mixed, success in getting the four project campuses to "include K-12 work in the mainstream of their faculty roles and rewards systems, both as described in policy and as enacted in the daily lives of their faculties", writes coeditor Crystal Gips. And her 50-page overview of the project suggests "strategies to help others advance the agenda at their institutions more quickly than we have done at ours". At the same time, she concludes, "In reflection, the project participants view the relationships between the map created in the [grant] proposal and the ground over which we actually traveled to have provided us with a journey through which we learned far more valuable lessons for higher education at large when we would have gained from a smooth run along the route we charted in advance". Among 15 such "valuable lessons" offered are these: - An institution's view of itself with respect to the community in which it lives appears to make a difference in the degree to which faculty recognize the work of the community as their work. - The extent to which the university mission recognizes a commitment to collaboration with the public schools, both in writing and in action, affects the larger degree of emphasis in the rewards system on this kind of work. The recency of the mission's emphasis on K-12 collaboration also has an impact. - The preexisting status of interdisciplinary work on the campus also affects the likelihood of faculty reaching across boundaries to the K-12 schools; perhaps even more significant, it also affects the tendencies of the faculty to link the disciplines and education in ways that are essential to the substantive reform of teacher education. - Use of financial rewards to support departmental efforts with K-12 partners can lead to more significant results than does rewarding individuals for their singular efforts. To order "Making a Place" ($16 each/$12 for AAHE members; plus $4 shipping), contact AAHE Publications Orders, 202/293-6440 x11, pubs@aahe.org .