By nature schools are a part and reflection of the communities in which they exist. Students, parents, and teachers often live in the same community in which the school is located. Despite the obvious connections, to a certain degree, many schools remain isolated from other institutions in the community.

Schools can, however, change this pattern to become more fully integrated into the broader community. Across the country, a number of innovative schools have forged unique partnerships with community organizations, thus allowing them to transform the way students learn and the way communities view the schools.

In many cases, the schools no longer exist solely as learning resources for students. In addition, they act as resources for the organizations and communities who have partnered with them. In this article, we refer to them as "integrated learning communities."

The integrated learning communities discussed here all have one thing in common. In at least part of their curriculum, they have chosen to implement a non-traditional approach to learning. They incorporate a variety of different methods, including project-based learning, discovery or inquiry-based learning, and experiential learning.

Although each integrated learning community is different, most have a clear commitment to working with professionals in the community to learn about and contribute to their work. As a result, students are more motivated because they work on real problems and/or issues that affect them as community members. They also are able to observe and interact with professionals in a variety of different fields.

Partners benefit from the contributions made by students and the community as a whole benefits from the relationships formed with partner schools. Often these partnerships help bridge economic, generational, and institutional gaps that may be present.

Unique characteristics of Integrated Learning Communities

• Involvement and collaboration—Schools use external field professionals, such as curators, preservationists, architects, designers, and scientists.
   
  
• Innovative approaches to curriculum—Curriculum decisions are often aligned with the institutions with whom they partner. Students are also often allowed considerable input into topics chosen for investigation.
   
  
• Involvement in projects that have real consequences/results—Student projects will have tangible results such as securing historic landmark status for a school, collecting data for a zoo, or hosting a conference about population growth.
   
• Interdisciplinary learning—Students draw from multiple subject areas to learn about the origin of the "problem" and to produce solutions to the challenge at hand.
   
• Constructivist learning—With an underlying belief in constructivist learning theory, these schools are committed to experiential approaches to learning.
   
• Teamwork and collaboration—This is an integral concept in these schools. Projects are primarily the result of teamwork. Although students have individual tasks, they need to work with others to complete the projects at hand.

Successful Models

There are many successful models of schools that work as integrated learning communities. Here is a sampling of a few that have become valuable partners in their communities.

DC Museum Magnet Schools

In 1996, the idea to create a partnership between local public schools and the Smithsonian Institution became a reality. Two inner city schools, Robert Brent Elementary School and Stuart Hobson Middle School, both located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, were chosen to become museum magnet schools for the city. Working closely with Smithsonian Institution education specialists, school curriculum directors and administrators created a blueprint for an integrated learning community that had at its disposal one of the largest museum collections in the world.

Both schools attract students from across the city with an innovative approach to learning. The program combines traditional class work with the study of primary sources, drawn from the vast collections of the country's largest and most diverse collection of art, history, and science resources. From this research, students prepare their own elaborate exhibitions in which they demonstrate what they have learned.

At Robert Brent Elementary School, students help generate the themes that will be the basis of their research and exhibition. Teachers seem to have an uncanny way of finding museum tie-ins to these themes. For example, when fourth-grade students chose to learn about forests, their teacher, Hollis Miller, didn't miss a beat. The National Zoo, a Smithsonian museum, was beginning a project to map all of the species of trees on zoo grounds. Miller found that the zoo was trying to enlist the help of students to complete the vast undertaking. During the project, students learned how to identify and tag trees and record the data. In so doing, students also met a math standard: they learned how to grid the coordinates of the trees. In the classroom, they would have plotted imaginary x and y coordinates on a grid.

For other themes, students visit the museum collections, gathering information about the exhibit focus and how the exhibition designers and curators have laid out and presented the exhibit. Smithsonian staff are on hand to provide details and answer questions.

As a culminating project, students work collaboratively in teams to create exhibits. Students must create objects for the exhibition, build the containers and pedestals for the work, write brochures, identify objects with interpretative text labels and, on opening night, act as docents.

Many people are invited to attend, including parents, teachers, Smithsonian staffers, and the public. Thus, the exhibition has a real audience, often with real applications and, most importantly to the students, a real sense of accomplishment.

School for Environmental Studies, Minnesota Zoological Gardens

In this unique public school, housed in a specially designed school building on the grounds of the Minnesota Zoological Gardens, students study the environmental sciences while developing leadership abilities.

The school, open since 1995, currently serves 400 juniors and seniors in the Minneapolis area. The program emphasizes a project-based approach where authentic learning experiences are connected to the real world. Zoo staff serve as adjunct faculty at the school, teaching a variety of classes including marine biology and animal behavior.

Using an interdisciplinary thematic curriculum, students are involved in projects at the zoo and in the community, such as helping to set up zoo or park displays and acting as interpreters for school and community groups.

Students also take core subject classes several days a week and also have the option of taking advanced placement classes that can be related or unrelated to the thematic units.

Despite the cold winter months, students conduct extensive year-round field work, studying the unique natural environment of Minnesota. Students are fortunate to have several living laboratories in which to study, including an adjoining 3000-acre park. They have the added benefit of a 12-acre campus located within the zoo grounds. Of course, they also have opportunities to study more than 2,000 different animal species at the zoo, many of which are not native to Minnesota.

Teachers and school administrators are also encouraged to undertake intensive professional development activities. Some teachers and top administrators have been known to collaborate with international experts in the field of conservation, including the chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall.

The School of Environmental Studies is a 1999 winner of the New American High Schools Award from the Department of Education.

Preservation in the Schools, Denver Public Schools

Not all integrated learning communities are housed within alternative schools, such as the ones described above. One example of this is the Denver Public School District. Since 1991, there has been a district-wide innovative curriculum initiative to research, preserve, and protect Denver's historic school buildings.

In this unique program, students have conducted research about the history of their school and documented it with video histories, alumni and neighbor interviews, architectural scale models, computer renderings, public tours, and historic landscape identification. Projects involve a wide variety of skills and can integrate nearly every subject taught. For example, many of Denver's schools still have murals that were painted by the Works Progress Administration, thus providing a logical entry into the study of that period in American history.

Once students have completed their research, they prepare detailed applications requesting historic landmark status for their school. They also make presentations to their communities about their research.

Students gain a good deal of school and civic pride when their historic buildings are given landmark status. Neighbors and communities also reap the benefits with reduced graffiti and improved civic relations with the schools and their students.

In 2000, the Denver Public Schools received a National Preservation Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

A Final Note

One of the outstanding benefits similar to each of these programs is that there is little additional burden on the school district to run them. These programs are all contained within public school districts. Their funds per student, teacher to student ratios, and student demographics are on par with other schools in their district. Some rely on grants to pay for additional learning opportunities, but so do most schools. The difference is that they have partnered with one or more community institutions to support their schools and learning goals. The organizations help the schools, but the relationships are genuinely mutually beneficial.

Integrated learning communities represent a logical progression of the ideas that John Dewey set forth earlier in the twentieth century: focused, experiential learning directed at helping students acquire the higher level thinking skills that will help them succeed as thoughtful citizens in a democracy.

Read More About It

The School for Environmental Studies
http://www.isd196.k12.mn.us/schools/ses/
This is the official site for the school and contains information about the program, the courses it offers, and visitor information. There are also numerous community links. Visitors can even join a listserv to be kept up-to-date on school activities.

Denver Public Schools Ensure the
Future by Teaching the Past
National Trust for Historic Preservation
http://www.nationaltrust.org/news/docs/20001018_award_denver.html
This article describes the unique program in the Denver Public Schools. For those interested in the topic of historic preservation, there is probably no better place to start than this highly respected organization's Web site.

Thomas Jefferson Center for Educational Design (TJCED)
Curry School of Education, University of Virginia
http://www.tjced.org/museum_schools.htm
This organizational Web site of TJCED promotes the innovative design of learning environments. This page provides a list of links to a wide variety of museum schools, including those discussed in this article.
Learn more about the concept of "educational design" by exploring other pages in this useful and interesting site.