Community Partnerships

A few weeks into her new job training teen volunteers at Pacific Science Center how to take up issues of equity and social justice in their work, Pilar Letrondo noticed something concerning mid-way through a session she was leading on identity.

"All the white kids sat on one side of the table and all of the non-white kids sat on the other," she said. "[I] realized that I needed to address the seating situation.”

It was a striking example of how physical spaces can impact teaching and learning, and even more so, the challenge of overcoming bias in educational spaces.

Over 24 intense hours, teams of University of Washington education students drew upon design thinking processes to craft new ideas for better addressing the educational needs of immigrant and refugee youth and families.

Long-time civic leader and philanthropist Ginger Ackerley will be remembered for advancing education in the Puget Sound region and her efforts to ensure that all children enter school prepared to learn throughout their lives.

In the coming year, Kristin Percy Calaff will be hiring up to 20 teachers who can speak Spanish or Vietnamese to staff the growing number of dual language classrooms in Highline Public Schools.

That is, if she can find them.

Across the United States, and indeed throughout the world, there’s passionate debate about how to best prepare teachers and ensure all students are taught by highly-qualified educators.

The University of Washington College of Education will deepen research-practice partnerships that are expanding access to high-quality educational opportunities for underserved students and communities in Washington state with a $1.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Over the next two years, the grant will build on the College’s extensive partnerships with more than 300 schools, districts, educational organizations and communities across the state and identify key areas of opportunity along the cradle-to-career education continuum.

This academic year, Shelley Stromholt (PhD '15), a University of Washington College of Education postdoctoral scholar and alumna, has received a prestigious Fulbright Research Award to study community-centered science learning alongside educational researchers in Norway.

The town of Faraday has a problem.

Its citizens are interested in building a magnetic train to make it easier to connect with other towns, but they need to figure out how to make the technology work.

That’s where the town’s scientists—in this case a group of two dozen Seattle 3rd, 4th and 5th graders enrolled in a summer learning program in the Beacon Hill neighborhood—come in.

It’s their job to collect evidence about how magnets work, determine whether the technology could be used to power a train and then explain their findings to the citizens of Faraday.

The biggest steps toward a life of opportunity, toward the fullest flourishing of one’s potential, happen in a child’s earliest years. Yet in Washington, one in five children grows up in poverty, and fewer than half of the state’s children are kindergarten-ready across all six domains of childhood development.

On Oct. 20, eight of Washington’s leading early learning researchers will discuss how every child can be assured a strong start during EDU Talks: Raising Washington, hosted by the University of Washington College of Education.

Most schools offer parents specific ways to help out: Join the PTA, chaperone a field trip, grade papers for a teacher or assist on a classroom art project.

Those volunteer opportunities, however, not only reinforce the top-down power structure of schools, but also cater to mostly white, privileged families, maintaining the institutionalized racism that marginalizes low-income families and families of color, said Ann Ishimaru, assistant professor of education at the University of Washington.