In and of the City: Theory of Action and the NYU Partnership School Program

Abstract

This article explores the theory of action underlying New York University's (NYU's) Partnership Schools Program—explaining in the process what a theory of action is, and how it can be constructed for other innovations in other contexts. NYU's Partnership Program involves 23 schools, K-12, spanning several of New York City's most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. It operates on the basis of what the authors call “mutual self-interest” and exploits what they call “complementarity.” The authors illuminate the program's original as well as its evolving intentions, and the environmental conditions necessary to enact them and to sustain the program over a decade. They also describe the program's core design elements, with a view to how these may be replicated elsewhere. Finally, they look closely at the Partnership's theory of action in action, employing action research data to portray a meeting where professors and teachers discuss the teacher education residency experiment they have collaboratively launched.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by a grant from the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Co-PIs are Joseph P. McDonald, Rosa Riccio Pietanza, and Frank Pignatosi. They are joined by the other authors, Myrrh Domingo (now of the Institute of Education and formerly of NYU), Jill Jeffery (now of Brooklyn College, and formerly of NYU). The authors wish to acknowledge as well contributions by Robert Miller, Scott Conti, John Istel, Mary Brabeck, Avi Kline, Tara Andreas, Kajal Vora, Jason Blonstein, and Robert Wallace. The data reported here is the product of a systematic review and coding of a voluminous archive of documents related to the founding and ongoing development of the Partnership, and of interviews transcribed and coded using Argyris and Schon's (1996) theory of action framework and derivations of it.

Notes

Donald Schon spoke these words to an interviewer sometime in the mid-1990s at his MIT office, and the videotape was shown without attribution at his memorial service, also at MIT, in the fall of 1997.