URBAN EDUCATION / MAY 2002Langhout et al. / INTEGRATING COMMUNITY INTO THE CLASSROOM INTEGRATING COMMUNITY INTO THE CLASSROOM Community Gardening, Community Involvement, and Project-Based Learning

This article is about the tensions faced in facilitating the relationship between teachers and communitymemberswhileworking toward a community garden pro-ject. The authors adopt an ecological model for effective classroom-community collaboration and discuss how this process unfolded in the current setting. Two classroom projects serve as exemplars of culturally relevant classroom-community collaboration. The garden project is evaluated through classroom-community collaboration models. This evaluation includes a discussion of com-mon and disparate goals of teachers and communitymembers and howdifferences are navigated in the current milieu. It is widely known that in the North American public school con-text, African American children are academically behind their White counterparts. Indeed, Alexander and Entwisle (1988) found that although African American and European American childre