Finding Our Voices and Our Research Skills During the Pandemic
We are members of UCLA Community School’s Student Advisory Board. When the coronavirus changed life as we knew it, we came together to be sure that student voices were heard…
Student Agency & Thriving
Creating Persistent Community: The Challenge of Aligning Supports for First-Generation College-going Students
This report documents the experiences of seven cohorts of students from the UCLA Community School and track their pathways to and through college using four measures: (1) postsecondary plans, (2)…
Infrastructuring Student Agency
Supporting students to actively and critically participate in their own learning requires extensive infrastructure in schools that serve historically nondominant students. As this report documents, students from these backgrounds tend…
Framing, Supporting, and Tracking College-For-All Reform
This article, published in The High School Journal, describes the collective problem-solving process that unfolded over a decade, from 2007 to 2017, as researchers and practitioners in a new K-12 urban public…
The Power of Self-Assessment: Using Community-Based Measures to Advance Biliteracy
This report provides an interactive roadmap that documents how educators and researchers partnered to pilot and design a community-based self-assessment system composed of self-assessment instruments (i.e. tools, assessment measures) and…
Nurturing Play: How Schools can Provide Powerful Opportunities for Children to Learn
A large body of research demonstrates the immense benefits of play for children’s academic learning and development. However, “playful learning,” a teaching approach that uses free-play as well as guided-play…
UCLA Community School Longitudinal College-going Data Report
This paper describes the collective problem-solving process that unfolded over a decade as researchers and practitioners worked together to expand access to college for traditionally underrepresented students. The paper describe three practical problems—how to frame, support, and track a college-for-all reform effort—and details how grappling with these problems locally provides unique insight into the larger college-for-all policy context.
High School Internships: Utilizing a Community Cultural Wealth Framework to Support Career Preparation and College-Going Among Low-Income Students of Color
This article, published in the Journal of Education Placed at High Risk investigates the experience of 229 low-income students of color who participated in an innovative high school internship program between 2011…
Supporting College-going for Undocumented Students
This brief describes the UCLA Community School’s efforts to address and meet the needs of undocumented students. We describe the school context as well as the symbiotic relationship between research and practice. We conclude by providing resources and considerations for practitioners to better support undocumented students on their campus.
