Kevin Michael Foster and G. Sue Kasun DREAMING IN CONTEXT:MICRO- AND STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN AN AGE OF STANDARDIZED TESTING A PARTNERSHIPS INSTITUTE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Consider academics who are committed to learn- ing, teaching, and ongoing interaction with com- munities beyond the university, and who are simultaneously not satisfied with the learning opportunities for children in their community schools. What roles might they play in their local community? One answer, made compelling by con- temporary models in practice, involves institution building—specifically, the co-construction and operation of critically engaged, action-oriented research groups to address challenges facing stu- dents, families, and schools. Examples include CREATE at The University of California at San Diego (Mehan 2008), The Cesar E. Chavez Insti- tute at San Francisco State (Duncan-Andrade and Morrell 2008), The Llano Grande Center for Research and Development (Guajardo et al. 2008), and the Lastinger Center for Learning at the Uni- versity of Florida. All interweave work in acade- mia, schools, and communities to collaboratively impact students; all strive for the transformation of schools and neighborhoods into communities of learning that serve all students well, regardless of racial, socio-economic or regional background. The Institute for Community, University, and School Partnerships (ICUSP) was founded in 2006 with similar hopes for educational and community transformation. We connect graduate teaching, academic research, and service in our communities to develop, implement, and support the research programs and practices that positively impact students. This reflective essay considers the develop- ment, project work, and theoretical interventions that characterize the young institute. It is authored from the standpoints of two engaged researchers at the institute (the faculty member who serves as the institute executive director and a former grad- uate student who served as one of the institute’s project directors).Both were agents of a university institution, yet also working within the larger structures of K-12 public schooling. 1 Following these introductory remarks, we discuss the found- ing philosophy of the institute. Partnerships are central to our work, and so we specifically address both theory and praxis of collaboratively engaging local communities. We think of our project work and community engagement in Freirian and Gramscian influenced terms of the move from the- ory to praxis. Next, we provide the story of one of our recent projects—a school-wide student advi- sory that was piloted on a low-performing middle school campus. We focus on our efforts to navi- gate the conflict between the systemic constraints of testing accountability on one hand and our agenda of transformative work on the other. This section illuminates the challenges often attendant with work in community and schools—especially that related to working within and yet hoping to alter prevailing societal and bureaucratic struc- tures. Finally, the discussion section that follows the case study is a dialogue between the authors about the theoretical implications of the challenges we face. We introduce the idea of micro- and struc- tural transformations as a way to further think about the intended outcomes of community engagement and partnerships. As we focus on our distinct notions of transformative work in educa- tion contexts, we add nuance to a theoretical frame that distinguishes between reformist and insurgent actions that amount to contextual inter- ventions, structural interventions, or that lead to structural transformations. This frame was intro- duced by anthropologist Ted Gordon and further developed in other ICUSP publications (Foster 2010; Kraehe et al. 2010). In our closing, we don’t initially agree upon what constitutes transformative work yet work through the tensions between our conceptions to produce a theorization that captures a range of emancipatory possibilities (Freire 1970) that accompany action-oriented scholarly work in schools and communities. We describe the thoughts, work, and actions of actors asserting their humanity amidst oppressive, dehumanizing or demeaning circumstances as either contextual 122 Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 21, Number 2, pp. 122–134, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. © 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/traa.12016.