Article
Exploring the Myth of School-University Partnerships: Untangling District Resistance and Academic Capitalism
Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education
(2021)
Abstract
In this paper we engage in reflexive methodology to make sense of our experiences in a particular school-university partnership and the district-level resistance from central office administrators we encountered in our work. We explore the nuanced accounts of resistance to reform and change in the context of a school-university partnership from central office or district-level administrators, even when teachers themselves acted as enthusiastic agents of change; to the general public, the inner-workings of district-level offices remain obscured. The purposes of the study, therefore, are two-fold: one, to shift blame away from teachers and students and center the role of district-level administrators as gatekeepers to social justice-oriented work even when teachers embrace it; and, two, to hold ourselves accountable to the students, teachers, and communities we serve. We situate our experiences within a larger neoliberal ideological framework and how our own social positions as university faculty were largely shaped by academic capitalism. The generative insights gleaned through our analysis are used to lay out a road map of possibilities for others engaged in social-justice projects within school-university partnerships.
Keywords
- school-university partnerships;,
- kitchen table reflexivity,
- academic capitalism
Disciplines
Publication Date
Summer August, 2021
DOI
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/taboo/vol20/iss3/9
Citation Information
Brianne W. Morettini, Daniel Tulino and Shelley Zion. "Exploring the Myth of School-University Partnerships: Untangling District Resistance and Academic Capitalism" Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education Vol. 20 Iss. 3 (2021) ISSN: 2164-7399 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/brianne-morettini/16/