Monica Medina

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1805/25252

Changing demographics and socioeconomic factors challenge public schools in urban cities across the nation. Community schools are used by many urban cities to address these challenges. Community Schools are collaborative partnerships that lead to improved student learning and healthier neighborhoods. Community-based partners, along with educators and families, create a school climate that is supportive, respectful, and conducive to learning. A particular strength of the community school model is local decision-making and a collaborative evaluation process. Site leadership teams- community school coordinators, parents, residents, teachers, staff, and students – make school-based decisions for school improvement. Site leadership teams also focus on making decisions that fulfill the needs of students, families, and the immediate community, while aligning those needs with academic goals.

Through mixed methods and participatory design, Dr. Monica Medina and her team engage in a process to assess school and community needs and present their findings to the larger community. Since 2008, Dr. Medina’s research has supported three community school grants awarded from the U.S. Department of Education in nine Indianapolis Public Schools.

Dr. Medina’s work to strengthen community schools is another example of how IUPUI faculty are TRANSLATING RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

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Recent Submissions

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    Your Life. Your Story. Latino Youth Summit: Building Latino Adolescent Resilience Through a Successful Community-Academic Partnership
    (Ball State University, 2016) Conrad, Katrina K.; Bigatti, Silvia M.; Diaz, Virna; Medina, Monica A.; Mirabal, Magdy; Weathers, Tess D.; Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Public Health
    Developing successful relationships between academia and community can be difficult. Investigators who want to work with community organizations often do not know where to start, or how to carry them out well. However, successful collaborations can speed up the transition from research to practice, and bring interventions to communities more effectively. We present the development of a successful partnership and the consequent intervention program, Your Life. Your Story., a yearlong resiliency-building intervention for Latino youth at risk for depression. We present the exploratory study where our relationship began, as well as the preliminary findings that led to the design of our intervention. We then present the detailed components of the resiliency-building, emotional expression, coping and social support intervention. We also present preliminary qualitative and quantitative results and show the yearlong intervention plan. Throughout, we show, in sections in italics, how the partnership guaranteed that the study and intervention would succeed.
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    Strengthening Community Schools Through University Partnerships
    (2013) Officer, Starla D.H.; Grim, Jim; Medina, Monica A.; Bringle, Robert G.; Foreman, Alyssa
    Given the mounting call for academic achievement gains in America’s public schools— particularly urban schools labeled “failing”—the need for community engagement to tackle a host of underlying social challenges warrants the resources of the nation’s colleges and universities (Harkavy & Hartley, 2009). Because colleges and universities are often underutilized anchors of resources in communities, coordinated alignment of K-12 and higher education goals can create a seamless pipeline of educational attainment for communities challenged to produce high academic achievement. Higher education’s engagement with community schools further helps to address the whole child and their families in K-12 education by expanding the opportunities for the students and community to access necessary support services. Drawing upon experiences of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and collaboration with its adjacent neighborhoods, this article illustrates the transformative and relevant impact of university and community engagement, as well as new pedagogical approaches to teaching, learning, and training. This article reflects upon the experiences of IUPUI and nearby George Washington Community High School as it can uniquely serve as a roadmap for other school community/university partnerships that are interested in embarking upon a similar education reform path.