Community participation and empowerment in marginalised contexts: leveraging parental involvement, adult education, and community organising through social justice leadership

ABSTRACT

Based on research in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, this article argues that the globally popular reform of school-based management suffers from several shortcomings and is a partial, extractive, and technocratic means of engendering parental and community participation. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that it is necessary to move beyond SBM as a technocratic reform if community participation is to contribute as well to community empowerment. More specifically, the article emphasises, first, the need to combine parental involvement with adult education, community organising, and social justice leadership (SJL). Second, the article argues that the last of these (i.e. SJL) is crucial to enabling the first three. Third, this article suggests that a combination of these four things – SJL, parental involvement, adult education, community organising – can contribute to the foundations of community empowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Qualitative methods
• Mexico
• community development
• community participation
• leadership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See DeMatthews, Edwards, and Rincones (2016) for a further discussion of the leadership strategies employed by the founders of the school in this research. We have truncated here our discussion of specific leadership strategies due to space constraints and due the focus of the present article on the connections between leadership and community empowerment.

2. For some examples, see, e.g. Altschuler and Corrales (2012), DeMatthews and Tarlau (2019), Edwards and Klees (2015), and Gandin and Apple (2001).