Promoting social inclusion counting with everyone : learning communities and INCLUD-ED

Abstract

The scientific community has provided a wide range of evidence that family and community involvement in schools benefits not only students' learning but also their surrounding community. The INCLUD-ED project has conducted case studies of successful schools around Europe that have strong community participation. Some of them are engaged in the Learning Communities project, an international project of educational and social transfonnation aimed at overcoming school failure. Through these case studies, INCLUD-ED has gone beyond the state of the art in the field and has provided a classification of types of family and community participation and identified forms of involvement that improve students' academic achievement. This article presents the benefits of those fonns of participation and focuses on some forms of commooity involvement in the Learning Communities that have been found to improve students' school learning and other education-related aspects, such as living together.