Ineffective family interventions for the prevention of childhood obesity have, in part, been attributed to the challenges of reaching and engaging parents. With a particular focus on parent engagement, this study utilized community-based participatory research to develop and pilot test a family-centered intervention for low-income families with preschool-aged children enrolled in Head Start.

Collaboration is a complex intervention with multiple components. It is both a process innovation and a product innovation, and it entails institutional development and change. These and other defining features implicate its contingencies. For example, collaboration is tailor made for needs, problems, and opportunities that manifest novelty, complexity, uncertainty, and interdependent relationships. Contingencies like these signal important constraints. For example, collaboration exacts steep transaction costs. Its potential benefits justify these costs and serve as incentives for its development. In fact, collaboration may be a defining feature of competent and optimal practice, and the failure to collaborate may be indicative of negligence and malpractice.

Proposals to prepare disciplinary stewards and optimize the conditions for collective stewardship can be framed in two ways. The dominant frame emphasizes disciplinary caretaking and lends comparatively less attention to reform and transformation. A second frame is grounded in the social ecology of particular disciplines, their fast-changing university homes, and society’s complex needs, problems, and opportunities, especially those that no longer fit inside the long-standing boundaries of particular disciplines and their specialties. Reformist and transformative stewardship in this second frame prioritizes the development of adaptive, connected disciplines characterized by new boundaries and bridging mechanisms for interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach/engagement. This frame also provides the opportunity to explore the difference between an academic discipline and a helping discipline. Questions remain about how leaders will persuade, support, and reward career-oriented, specialized faculty members to engage in all such acts of stewardship for Kinesiology alongside their customary concern for their respective sub-disciplines.

Isolated teachers in stand-alone American schools are expected to engage diverse students in the quest to facilitate their academic learning and achievement. This strategy assumes that all students will come to school ready and able to learn, and educators in stand-alone schools can meet the needs of all students. Student disengagement gets short shrift in this framework, and so does teacher disengagement. A growing body of research emphasizes needs for nuanced engagement frameworks, better data systems, customized interventions facilitated by intervention registries, and bridge building between schools and community health, mental health, and social service agencies. Here, engagement and disengagement challenges are reframed as opportunities for collective action, including interprofessional teams, community agency–school partnerships, cross-sector collective impact formations, cradle-to-career system building, and community development initiatives. Together these collective action forms signal new institutional designs which are fit for purpose when child/family poverty, social exclusion, and social isolation conspire against student engagement and school success.

Schools worldwide are developing innovative models in response to, and in anticipation of, societal changes. Aiming to address non-academic barriers to learning, while capitalizing on out-of-school time, some school and community leaders have prioritized family and community partnerships, especially in the United States (U.S.). The Community Collaboration Model (CCM) is one such U.S. partnership-oriented model of expanded school improvement. In contrast to some partnership-oriented models, the CCM prioritizes improvements in classrooms and communities, aiming to support students, assist teachers, and improve relationships beyond the typical school day. This scoping review examines 14 peer-reviewed articles which describe CCM-centered innovations and documented outcomes. Barriers and facilitators associated with CCM adoption and implementation in diverse U.S. school and community settings also are explored. CCM’s contributions to important student and school outcomes (e.g., increased access to mental health services, improved school climate, decreased discipline referrals) are documented in this scoping review. Some researchers have also described implementation-related facilitators (e.g., partnerships with universities) and barriers (e.g., initial resistance by educators) that influence the utility of the model in practice. Drawing on prior research, the authors discuss findings and implications for future research, educational policy, and practice.

Researchers’ social-cultural organization influences the scope, quality, quantity, coherence, dissemination, utilization and impact of research-based, theoretically sound knowledge. Five concepts—paradigm, exemplar, segment, network and gatekeeper—are salient to research on researchers’ organization. Autobiographical reflections signal these concepts’ salience to knowledge generation, school program designs and researchers’ career patterns. These reflections also indicate the selectivity and potential limitations of conventional paradigms. Rapid, dramatic social change compels strategic searches, which are prerequisite to ‘re-search.’ After all, today's physical education programs, like the schools that harbor them, are industrial age institutions. These institutions are out-of-step with contemporary realities. A new century search, research and development agenda directed toward physical education's reformation and transformation may begin with selected design criteria. These criteria and this larger agenda necessitate new paradigms, exemplars, segments and networks.