"Parent engagement with schools is known to be key to student achievement, but building such involvement can be a challenge, especially in economically disadvantaged schools that need it the most. In Community connections and your PLC at Work®: A guide to engaging families, author Nathaniel Provencio guides readers to build this vital engagement by broadening a school's professional learning community (PLC) so it includes parents, families and other community members in a productive collaboration toward success for all students. Drawing on his own experience as a principal who used the PLC process to transform a struggling school into an award-winning one, Provencio demonstrates how F-12 schools can use the focus on learning, collaboration and results at the heart of the PLC process to not merely enhance family engagement but also create a collaborative culture in which all stakeholders become educators." -- back cover.

Many of our current social problems have been attributed to the breakdown or loss of community as a place and to the fragmentation of connections due to an extreme value of individualism in the Western world, particularly in the United States. Not all scholars and researchers agree that individualism and technology are the primary culprits in the loss of community as it existed in the middle decade of the 20th century. Nonetheless, people exist in groups, and connections are vital to their existence and in the daily performance of activities. The second edition of the Sociology of Community Connections will identify and help students understand community connectedness in the present and future.

Making Community Connections: The Orton Family Foundation Community Mapping Program is designed to bring teams of teachers and their students together with community members to study a problem, a resource, a condition -- any matter of interest and importance to the community. The school work includes gathering and examining existing information, discovering new facts through field investigation, and mapping the resource using GIS/GPS tools. Not only do the students meet and work with community mentors and experts who participate in the classroom and help with the field studies, they also typically hold public forums to gather input on the resource and their work. At the end of the semester or project the students hold a public forum to present their work in a variety of forms (including video conferences, speeches and presentations, reading of narratives, display of hand-drawn maps, GIS maps, etc.), providing a body of research to the community, which can be used to address immediate concerns and help plan for the future. The use of the word "mapping" in the name of the program indicates the importance of, and the commitment to, the use of GIS/GPS mapping technology. The Orton Family Foundation Community Mapping Program has found that the use of technology, and particularly this mapping technology, excites students and provides a powerful incentive to participate. However, the program, this book, and place-based education in general call for more than just the mapping of resources; they entail a more inclusive and integrative look at the world we all live in. Invariably, the Community Mapping Program makes more clearly visible the connections of the many and varied factors influencing or affecting the particular object of study. Concepts of sustainability, responsibility, integration, and the larger picture find their way into classroom discussions and are then mapped in a variety of ways. The materials in Making Community Connections have been constructed to provide a solid foundation and flexible framework for original projects created and developed by students, their teachers, and their communities, allowing explorations and investigations of places and problems of interest and concern to them. Book jacket.

True community integration is much more than placing an individual with a disability in a community setting ... it also means belonging and being in close friendships with other community members without disabilities. Now, this perceptive book gleans principles from successful experiences to help others build relationships of their own through natural social connections. The authors of this heartening guide to relationships and community connections combine the wisdom gained from their varied backgrounds in advocacy, service provision, parenting, and research to explore how friendships can enhance the lives of every individual in the community. Each author considers a different facet of friendship, such as: work and leisure relationship; gender-related expectations; community associations and groups; the roles of love, affection, and intimacy.

Both realism and justice demand that efforts to conserve biological diversity address human needs as well. The most promising hope of accomplishing such a goal lies in locally based conservation efforts -- an approach that seeks ways to make local communities the beneficiaries and custodians of conservation efforts. Natural Connections focuses on rural societies and the conservation of biodiversity in rural areas. It represents the first systematic analysis of locally based efforts, and includes a comprehensive examination of cases from around the world where the community-based approach is used. The book provides: an overview of community-based conservation in the context of the debate over sustainable development, poverty, and environmental decline case studies from the developed and developing worlds -- Indonesia, Peru, Australia, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom -- that present detailed examples of the locally based approach to conservation a review of the principal issues arising from community-based programs an agenda for future action

The connections between communities and forests are complex and evolving, presenting challenges to forest managers, researchers, and communities themselves. Dependency on timber extraction and timber-related industries is no longer a universal characteristic of the forest community. Remoteness is also a less common feature, as technology, workforce mobility, tourism, and 'amenity migrants' increasingly connect rural to urban places.Forest Community Connections explores the responses of forest communities to a changing economy, changing federal policy, and concerns about forest health from both within and outside forest communities. Focusing primarily on the United States, the book examines the ways that social scientists work with communities-their role in facilitating social learning, informing policy decisions, and contributing to community well being. Bringing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, political science, and forestry, the authors review a range of management issues, including wildfire risk, forest restoration, labor force capacity, and the growing demand for a growing variety of forest goods and services. They examine the increasingly diverse aesthetic and cultural values that forest residents attribute to forests, the factors that contribute to strong and resilient connections between communities and forests, and consider a range of governance structures to positively influence the well being of forest communities and forests, including collaboration and community-based forestry.

This book contains 12 chapters providing information on case studies that describe the change, loss, re-emergence and resilience of seven herder communities located in distinct socio-ecological settings ranging from the Gobi Desert of Mongolia to the Tibetan Plateau regions of China's Sichuan and Gansu Provinces. It will be useful for policy makers within international development and conservation policy.