Our research methodologies are rooted in the practices of community school practitioners around the country and are currently consolidated around three major questions:
- How do local universities best prepare undergraduate students to enter Durham Public School (DPS) classrooms with a critical lens for race, class, and Durham’s history?
- How do we build a robust online dashboard that prepares undergraduate students, DPS teachers, and DPS parents to understand their neighborhoods through an asset-based perspective?
- How do we develop accessible pipelines for the next generation of community school practitioners?
To answer each of these questions, the team consists of three sub-teams:
- Data Dashboard
- Anti-Racism Curriculum
- Teach-Ins
This is an example of one of our geospatial variables: grocery stores. The highlighted area is the Eastway Elementary school zone. In this example, grocery stores show food accessibility within the school community.
The dashboard, created by the 2021 Data+ team and maintained and expanded by the Bass Connections and 2022 and 2023 Data+ teams, is an interactive web application compiling information about 52 Durham schools— 29 elementary, 9 middle, 12 high, 2 6th-12th — to be used by school leadership, parents, interested community members, advocacy groups to provide information and awareness to school communities about resources in their area. There are three key sections of our project: geospatial variables, school-specific variables, and context & resources.
We strived to create an informative and accessible resource that will offer administrators, teachers, parents, community members, and university students with necessary and beneficial information about Durham Public Schools as well as frame the schools in a positive light by using an asset-based approach.
Anti-Racism Curriculum
Created by the curriculum sub-team, the anti-racism curriculum contains eight modules— covering topics ranging from implicit biases to Durham history— intended to prepare university students to enter Durham schools. After years of development, the curriculum is ready for testing and evaluation by experts to ensure its effectiveness and relevance, made possible through a grant to pilot the curriculum in university courses across Durham.
Teach-Ins
New in 2023, the teach-in team seeks to assess the efficacy of exposing teachers at various career stages to the community school model and develop strategies for scaling this model to promote widespread application in diverse educational settings. In partnership with Duke’s TeachHouse, a living and learning community for early career teachers and graduates, the team hosted six sessions and found that participants effectively learned about the community school model and plan to advocate for it in their own schools.
