Transforming traditional views of school leadership for school-community collaboration: a PALAR approach

ABSTRACT

Schools in poor working class communities in South Africa face a myriad of equity challenges that impact negatively on their ability to achieve basic school functionality. Yet, within such communities, there exists a wealth of valuable local knowledge and support that can be mobilised to assist school leaders, not only to bring about school improvement but also to reimagine effective schooling. However, the process of integrating such support into a school requires a reconsidering and repositioning of traditional views of school leadership. As a school leader, I embarked on a research journey, with 15 community volunteers, to understand how to integrate their work into the daily functioning of our school. I share my learning from the process of action learning with the community volunteers. I use the seven guiding principles of participatory action learning and action research (PALAR) to validate my claims to knowledge. The key findings indicate the value that PALAR holds for the development of a reflexive school leadership praxis that supports community agency towards school and community development. The conclusions drawn contribute to educational leadership theory by providing an evidence-based example of how an action learning process can facilitate collaboration between school leadership and community members.

KEYWORDS:

• Community engagement
• community school
• leadership
• participatory action learning and action research
• reflection
• schooling

Acknowledgements

The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Bruce Damons, Ph.D., MA, STD is an appointed Lecturer and Director of the Centre for the Community School, an engagement centre of the Faculty of Education, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. He has extensive experience in the schooling sector, having served 16 years as a principal in a community-school. He is an emerging school scholar in school improvement and the fields of critical participatory action research.

Lesley Angelina Wood is a Research Professor in the Faculty of Education at North-West University and Director of a research entity, Community-based Educational Research. She is an NRF rated researcher whose interests lie in researching participatory ways to facilitate psycho-social wellness within various educational communities with a particular focus on action research for professional, institutional and community learning and development. She has received international recognition for her work in action research and HIV and AIDS, having been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2014 by Moravian College, Pennsylvania, USA. She has published widely and has received several internationally funded grants for her projects, as well as holding various honorary research appointments at international institutions at various times.

Notes

1 Community and school is hyphenated to emphasise the importance of the link of the community to the school and the school to the community.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation [Grant Number 116245,93316].