Partnering across cultures: Bridging the divide between universities and minority high schools

The historical mission of most engineering-dominated Research-1 universities is to create new knowledge and to train students in technological fields. In the absence of a College of Education, and given an institutional culture prioritizing scholarly research, institutions such as Georgia Tech often do not have a long history of systemic faculty involvement in the K-12 educational community. However the current national focus, initiated by public funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, encourages academic scientists and engineers to shoulder some of the responsibilities for the quality of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education at the K-12 level, and to do this by developing university-K-12 "partnerships." Unfortunately, given the vast cultural differences that exist between universities and K-12 schools, these partnerships too often flounder, never managing to bridge the divide to the point of mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual benefit. We are currently in the third year of an NSF-funded GK-12 project, the Student and Teacher Enhancement Partnership (STEP)*, and are preparing to embark on a five-year extension. A major part of this project has been the building, nurturing, and grooming of partnerships between Georgia Tech and local minority high schools. As part of this project we have developed a model of partnerships that is grounded in the public policy literature and that describes the evolution of the partnerships created between Georgia Tech and four minority-dominated high schools as part of STEP. In this paper we will describe the theoretical framework of the partnership model, outline ways to assess partnership outcomes, and apply this model to the STEP program case study.