UCLA ED&IS Magazine
Fall 2024
All Articles
UCLA Center for Community Schooling: Partnering to Make California’s Vision for Community Schools a Reality
Interview with Karen Hunter Quartz, director UCLA Center for Community Schooling
Read Full Article
Shining a Light on Community School Leadership
Q&A with Queena Kim, principal of the UCLA Community School
Read Full Article
Exploring the Role of Community Schools in the Development of Teachers & Teaching
Research presented at the 2024 meeting of the American Educational Research Association highlights the work of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling in exploring the importance of teacher retention—particularly for teachers of color—and how California’s investment in the expansion of community schools may provide an opportunity for doing just that.
Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants – A Q&A with Assistant Professor of Information Studies, Melissa Villa-Nicholas
In her new book, “Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants” Villa-Nicholas investigates entrenched and emerging borderland technology that ensnares all people in an intimate web of surveillance where data resides and defines citizenship, and shows how surreptitious monitoring of Latinx immigrants is the focus of and the driving force behind Silicon Valley’s growing industry within defense technology manufacturing.
Read Full Article
A Passion for Community Engaged Environmental Education
Chris Jadallah, an assistant professor of environmental justice in education, is working with Black Thumb Farm in the San Fernando Valley to pilot a small research and design project, that is looking at the relationship between gardening the land and our relationship to it.
The SMASH Project
An interdisciplinary partnership between the UCLA Departments of Education and Information Studies collaborates with the Organization for Social Media Safety as part of UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate, which brings together scholars from across campus and external partners with the aim of better understanding and ultimately mitigating hate in its multiple forms.
Read Full ArticleA Message from UCLA Wasserman Dean Tina Christie
At UCLA Ed&IS, one of the most notable ways we connect with local educators and students is through our work with community schools. This approach to schooling has received much attention in recent years, as the COVID-19 pandemic helped bring its value into stark relief. These institutions—which number more than 8,000 nationwide—are centers for academic learning, but they also serve as hubs for community engagement and support, integrating academic, health, and social services to address the diverse needs of students and their families. By involving families and community members in the educational process—and by partnering with businesses as well as with colleges and universities—community schools create a supportive network that has been shown to enhance student achievement and overall well-being and help build a robust and interconnected community.
In 2009, UCLA Community School (CS1) was launched as a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. In the intervening years, CS1 has become a beacon of success within the community and the larger community schooling world. Graduation rates began at 13 percent and are now at 98 percent, with significant groups of students attending UCs and CSUs, including UCLA. In 2016, UCLA Ed&IS partnered with LAUSD again to form Mann UCLA Community School in South Los Angeles.
The UCLA Center for Community Schooling works closely with both schools and the state network of community schools to provide support and research. In 2023, California committed $4.1 billion to making one in three schools in the state part of this movement.
This issue of the Ed&IS Magazine begins by spotlighting educational researchers who are focusing on this powerful trend. We start with a conversation with Karen Hunter Quartz, director of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling, who shares insights into the state-level policy work she and the center are engaged with. We then shift to a conversation with Queena Kim, principal of the UCLA Community School, to learn more about what it’s like to lead such a dynamic institution.
Next, we explore community schools’ potential for teacher development. We look at research conducted by UCLA scholars Tomoko M. Nakajima, Natalie Fensterstock, and Jeffrey Yo in collaboration with Darlene Tieu, an educator at Mann UCLA Community School.
We then broaden the scope of our exploration of community by looking closely at the work of two Ed&IS scholars. First, in an excerpt from her book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants, Department of Information Studies Assistant Professor Melissa Villa-Nicholas describes the use of biotechnology to map and surveil undocumented individuals, revealing the sobering effects of defense technology manufacturing on Latinx immigrants.
Continuing our look at the connections between community and science, we explore Department of Education Assistant Professor Chris Jadallah’s work on community-engaged science. Through a series of workshops at a small urban San Fernando Valley farm, Jadallah is training high schoolers to collect oral histories about their families’ and communities’ relationships to food, farming, and gardening.
Finally, we examine the Social Media and the Spread of Hate (SMASH) Project, a joint effort between Ed&IS and the Organization for Social Media Safety (OFSMS) that focuses on digital media well-being, including the effects of social media on children and young adults. In this article, we highlight OFSMS CEO Marc Berkman’s testimony before Congress, in which he shared findings from SMASH’s ongoing research efforts.
Through this collection of articles, we aim to underscore the vital ways that Ed&IS is engaged with, learns from, and is responsible to our community, both local and otherwise. We hope it inspires you to strengthen your connections to the world around you.
In unity—
Tina
