This symposium explores and examines the challenges and opportunities of building community-university collaborations in marginalized urban areas. The selection of short essays highlights different experiences of building and sustaining community-university partnerships in a variety of cities as vehicles for enhancing experiential learning in…

Preservice educators engaged in experiential, place-based learning through a semester-long assignment in which they observed a specific place in Central Park in Manhattan, New York, and kept a nature journal. The assignment was organized around two pivotal elements: direct, sensory experience and time in place. Both elements added vital dimensions…

Scholars have provided numerous critical analyses of the structural causes of poverty. Unfortunately, many teachers are still led to believe, via best selling books and mainstream discourse, that behaviors, neighborhoods, and families determine educational outcomes. This "culture of poverty" theory must be disproved; educators need to be…

One special difficulty in teaching world geography is overcoming the scale differential between individual students' direct experiences and the immense size and complexity of the world. An innovative framework of operational principles, or maxims, has been suggested, and an application of the framework is described. Students search out examples in…

Students often ask whether the examples we give as instructors have any relevance to their worlds, to their lives. Too often the answer is no. This paper describes a case that is obviously pertinent to both secondary and university students and their instructors. The legal battle over equality and racial discrimination in the New York City School…