Painting the emerging image: portraits of family-informed scholar activism

Abstract

In this article, we, two professors and two students of educational leadership, embrace the pedagogies of community engagement through the ecologies of self, organization, and community. In this article, we explore the development of community-engaged scholars and practitioners through two distinct lenses: faculty who facilitate engaged learning processes and student-practitioners who are enacting these processes in their work. We use an auto-ethnographic technique, our own stories, to describe the will (motivation) and capacity (knowledge) gained through community engagement. More importantly, we provide vivid accounts of marked differences in our teaching, learning, and leadership. As a result, we have become activists in our craft as practitioners and scholars. We also examine how our community-based teaching and learning has been manifested in our current practice..

Keywords:

• Engaged scholarship
• principal preparation
• faculty development
• community engagement
• auto-ethnography