Blurring the Boundaries to Promote School-University Partnerships

Abstract

I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory).... Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element (Anzaldua, 1987, preface). In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua describes her experiences in straddling two cultures and points out that borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them (p. 3). Similar to the setting Anzaldua portrays, schools and universities exist as two distinct cultures with borders differentiating the practitioners from the professors. The emergence of school-university partnerships has created a borderland where those who work in both settings may find themselves trying to swim in a new element. Many school-university partnerships are based on the premise of equal partners working together in a mutually beneficial relationship (Sirotnik & Goodlad, 1988). Professional development schools (PDSs), for example, create a new institutional coalition of universities, schools of education, and public schools, a coalition based on the notion of true reciprocity (Holmes Group, 1990). Emerging as one of the most common collaborative arrangements for preparing prospective teachers (Yinger & Hendricks, 1990), PDSs have three main goals: to support student learning, to support the professional education of novice and veteran teachers, and to encourage inquiry and research related to educational practice (Levine, 1988, 1992). Extending beyond other school reform efforts, PDSs offer promising possibilities in creating new frames for teacher learning, building new ways of knowing, and providing new opportunities for mutual restructuring of schools and universities (Darling-Hammond, 1994). However, the process of creating professional development schools is a complex enterprise, particularly because it involves combining institutions with distinctive and possibly conflicting missions, organizational structures, and cultures. These distinctions lead to a variety of challenges such as defining roles and responsibilities (Miller & Silvernail, 1994), resolving conflicting fundamental interests (Snyder, 1994), establishing interinstitutional authority and fiscal responsibility (Neufeld, 1992), and providing longterm rewards (Lieberman, 1992; Sandholtz & Merseth, 1992). Some find the university, more than the schools, to be tradition-bound with a culture based on individual entrepreneurship, deep seeded conservatism, and an avoidance of risk and change (Miller, 1993, p. 5). Others encounter a large gulf between teachers' and professors' views on teaching and learning that results in people frequently working at cross-purposes (Winitzky, Stoddart, & O'Keefe, 1992). Institutional differences arise in nearly every aspect of these collaborative ventures. A strategy for bridging these differences is the creation of viable liaison positions in which people, both knowledgeable about and comfortable with the cultures of the collaborating institutions, move freely between them, interpret the language, understand the reward systems, and translate the ideas of those in one culture to those in another (Clark, 1988, p. 61). These boundary spanners, if legitimate in both institutions, establish critical links between schools and universities. Recruiting such individuals is challenging, given the established reward system for university faculty and the structured schedule of public school teachers. Lieberman (1992) points out that these boundary-spanning positions involve the traditional categories of teaching, research, and service, though not in the traditional sense and thus generally not recognized in the university's promotion process. For teachers, released time or joint appointments can be difficult to arrange, and additional work outside of school hours becomes burdensome. …