Community Partnerships

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.

Despite the growing awareness of socio-ecological challenges facing humans in the 21st century, science learning still mostly takes place inside the classroom, disconnected from the natural world.

Researchers from the University of Washington College of Education shared their work to realize the promise of making and tinkering for diverse audiences during the American Educational Research Association’s 2017 annual meeting.

With everything teachers do in a school day—leading class, grading homework, preparing lesson plans—there’s precious little time for one of the biggest factors contributing to student success: building positive relationships.

The University of Washington College of Education’s Ann M. Ishimaru, whose work focuses on engaging historically marginalized families in the creation of more equitable educational systems, has been awarded the American Educational Research Association’s 2017 Exemplary Contributions to Practice-Engaged Research Award.

University of Washington College of Education faculty and students will present their ongoing research to advance teaching quality, early learning, STEM education and more during the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting April 27 - May 1 in San Antonio. The theme of this year's AERA meeting is "Knowledge to Action: Achieving the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity."

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of Washington College of Education No. 9 among the nation's best education schools in its annual graduate school ratings, released March 14.

UW College of Education ranked No. 3 among education schools at public institutions in the U.S. in the 2018 edition of the U.S. News ratings. This is the fourth consecutive year that UW has been ranked third or higher among public institutions by U.S. News.

Joyce Parker devotes her heart and soul to making sure kids are in school and pointed toward graduation.

“Everyone’s responsible when children are out of school: parents, social workers, church members, teachers, police officers and so on,” said the director of Citizens for a Better Greenville.

That belief set the foundation of the organization’s “Missing in Action” campaign, launched as a concerted community approach to boosting the Mississippi city’s 66 percent graduation rate.