University–School–Community Partnership as Vehicle for Leadership, Service, and Change: A Critical Brokerage Perspective

ABSTRACT

Using a critical brokerage perspective to advance theoretical insights in the development of a community university partnership and understanding of the organizational embeddedness of a community empowerment agency in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, this article suggests that partnerships between American universities and communities are perfect vehicles for envisioning engaged scholarship rooted in neighborhoods and communities. The article concludes that diversely positioned leaders and scholars in universities and schools, and indigenous leaders in the community, can learn from and apply principles of partnership and critical brokerage to work together to forward justice and change in their own neighborhoods and settings.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the editors of this special issue for their consistent and thoughtful direction. William Rodick was instrumental in providing research assistance and bibliographic support in an earlier draft and two anonymous reviewers provided invaluable critique and suggestions in a later version of the article.

Notes

^1. For instance, Boyer envisions three new forms of scholarship: in the scholarship of integration, scholars give meaning to isolate facts by making connections across disciplines and illuminate data in revealing and relevant ways. In the scholarship of application, scholars ask questions related to how the knowledge can be applied responsibly and helpful to individuals as well as institutions. In the scholarship of teaching, scholars do more than transmit knowledge but look for ways of transforming and extending it.

^2. Within a larger discussion of purposeful and selective sampling (Patton, 2002), information-rich cases occur when “one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the research” (Coyne, 1997, p. 624).