The Learning of Stakeholders in a Community School: A Narrative History of Gardner Pilot Academy

Abstract

A key dimension to social justice leadership is building authentic partnerships with families and community-based organizations to confront educational inequities. Authentic partnerships are respectful alliances among educators, families, and community agencies that value building relationships, communicating across difference, and sharing power for the common goal of achieving social justice and equity in schools. Place-based educational reforms, such as community schools, strive to foster authentic partnerships through a web of support integrating three interconnected systems: a strong core instructional program, enrichment activities to expand learning opportunities, and a full range of health and mental health services. This case study examines how key stakeholders - administrators, teachers, board members, community members, and parents - learned to transform a traditional public school into a community school, dramatically expanding authentic partnerships. We examine the learning architecture of the communities of practice (COPs) as these stakeholders established, grew, and sustained this community school. Our analysis shows that people enact transformation by learning new knowledge, skills, and dispositions, and this learning happens within COPs. The findings of our study exhibit the learning of a COP to create organizational routines and structure to foster authentic partnerships becomes a powerful tool to enhance social justice in school as such partnerships empower marginalized students and families. We discuss implications for how educational leaders seeking to advance social justice can move from identifying exemplary institutions to productively analyzing factors contributing to the organizational transformation.

Notes

1 Green (2017) describes community-based equity audits as “an instrument, strategy, process, and approach to guide educational leaders in supporting equitable school-community outcomes” (p. 5) that helps reshape the view of educational leaders on marginalized communities from asset-based perspectives and, therefore, work with the communities for equitable change in practice.

2 The concept of duality is different than dichotomy. A dichotomy is an either/or relationship. Dualities operate independently, but affect one another. By way of analogy, a volume control is dichotomous: it can be moved higher or lower, but can’t be simultaneously moved higher and lower. The bass and treble controls are dualities: both can be independently adjusted, and they affect the sound together.