Most students, staff, and faculty at Brown know that a swipe of their university ID card gets them free rides on any RIPTA route in the state. One of the first things new members of the community are encouraged to do is get their Brown cards. The card office is located in the same place as the transportation office, so when they go to get their card they also learn that it doubles as a bus pass. This is such a basic fact of life at Brown that explicitly articulating it hardly seems necessary. But knowing this information can be the difference between a high school student in the Providence Public School District applying to one of Brown’s Pre-College Programs or not, as students in Yoko Yamamoto’s CBLR-course EDUC 1190 Family Engagement in Education learned during the 2023 Fall Semester.
Yamamoto has been teaching EDUC 1190 at Brown for over eight years. The course focuses on the importance of strong and culturally responsive family and school partnerships to improve both student experiences and outcomes as well as school success. One of the central questions students explore in the course is what are the strengths and barriers parents from diverse sociocultural backgrounds face in navigating their children’s education. As part of their work for the course, students spend time volunteering in local schools and doing collaborative projects with community organizations that support family engagement in education.
When a group of three students, Carlson Ogata ‘25, Patrick Raourke ‘25, and Robert Guterl ‘26, took the course in Fall 2023, they observed a science class at Hope High School - a Providence public school about a ten-minute walk from Brown’s campus - as part of DEEPS CORES, a community outreach program run by Olga Prilipko Huber, Senior Research Associate and Outreach Coordinator in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
The collaboration among Yamamoto, Prilipko Huber, and Joi-Danelle Whitehead, Assistant Dean for Equity Initiatives and University K-12 Engagement in the Division of Pre-College and Undergraduate Programs, goes back a few years. Since 2021 they have worked together, along with students from Brown, including some in Yamamoto’s class, to mentor Hope High School students through applying to Pre-College Programs.
During Fall 2023, Pilipko Huber suggested the students from EDUC 1190 explore what potential barriers may be for the high school students in both applying and attending Pre-College Programs at Brown as part of their final project for the course, and they enthusiastically took initiative to devise a project. They started by designing and circulating surveys for the high schoolers. Then they worked with them on how to best approach and survey their parents; designed a bilingual survey; and followed up about survey completion using text messages and emails.
While there weren’t many responses and only one student listed “commuting” as a concern, more parents worried about “transportation” or “commuting,” They did not elaborate what specifically they were concerned about, but the responses were enough to get everyone involved in the project thinking about what this might mean and how it might translate into a barrier. PPSD students have free access to RIPTA during the academic year when school is in session, but do not during the summer. The language the Pre-College website used at the time said scholarships would not cover transportation, but what that actually meant was scholarships would not cover airfare to a program location abroad or in another part of the United States. It did not mean that families had to pay for bus fare, yet nowhere made it clear that enrolled students would get a Brown ID and that it doubles as a RIPTA bus pass. This is when Pilipko Huber and the students from Yamamoto’s class realized some PPSD students might be missing out on a potentially life-changing educational opportunity as a result of unclear language on the Pre-College website.
Yamamoto’s course is designed to disseminate students' projects and findings to bring tangible contributions to community partners and stakeholders. At the start of the Spring 2024 Semester and eager to share what his team had learned, Guterl reached out to Whitehead and asked if they could present some feedback to her about language on the program’s website. The group ended up doing their presentation twice, once for Whitehead and again for her and members of the Pre-College Marketing and Enrollment Services team. Yamamoto and Pilipko Huber were impressed that the students remained dedicated to presenting their findings months after the course had finished.
Whitehead has been at Brown for ten years and plays a central role not only in working to make the Pre-College Programs more accessible to local students but also enhancing Brown’s institutional engagement readiness and coordination with local K-12 partners. As a part of this work she, along with Kelly Clifton, the Head of Library Community Engagement at Brown, co-chairs the K-12 Partnership Committee, which also includes colleagues from Education, DEEPS and other academic units. A July 2025 News from Brown article about Pre-College Programs reported local enrollment has steadily increased over the last three years. This past summer about 180 students from PPSD enrolled in the program, the largest participation of local Providence students in its history. In 2023, the Division of Pre-College & Undergraduate Programs introduced a new scholarship model. Before its implementation there were fewer than 50 PPSD students a year who participated in Brown Pre-College summer programs. Now that number is closer to 200, and the number of students who attended from Hope High School has increased from an average of one a year between 2017 and 2020 to seven this past summer.
Whitehead attributes this positive trend primarily to a change in the scholarship model, but also the ability of the Pre-College team to receive feedback from community stakeholders, Providence Public School District liaisons, and students, like Guterl, as part of continuously refining their approaches to outreach. Brown’s distinctive institutional culture nurtures a commitment to community engagement across the university in a way that supports student research being able to have a direct impact on a university program. The insights from this student project also led Pilipko Huber to ensure that the students who participate in DEEPS CORES paid summer internships introduced in the summer of 2024 get free access to RIPTA in addition to their summer stipend.
Yamamoto’s Family Engagement class is just one of many Community-Based Learning and Research courses the Department of Education offers as part of a broader departmental commitment to community engagement. Yamamoto is teaching it again this fall among other undergraduate offerings that include EDUC 0520 Adolescent Literature taught by Laura Snyder, EDUC 0530 Fieldwork and Seminar in Secondary Education taught by Tricia Kelly, and EDUC 1015 Reimagining Power: Community-Driven Evaluation and Education taught by Jacques Lesure. Completing a CBLR course is one way for students to fulfill the undergraduate concentration’s experiential requirement. The department has also convened a community of practice among instructors to “support course design, pedagogy, student success, and meaningful service to our community partners.”