conflict views of school community

International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership, January 10, 2007, Volume 2, Number 1 1

CONFLICTING VIEWS OF SCHOOL COMMUNITY: THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN

ADMINISTRATORS AND TEACHERS

JOHN BARNETT AND GERALD FALLONUniversity of Western Ontario

This project was the second phase of a two-phase study of teachers’ knowledge of community in an urban, private boys’ dayschool in Canada. The first phase examined a teacher’s perception of her classroom community, and this phase asked teach-ers and administrators in the same school about their perceptions of school community. We found that the school createdand implemented an organizational structure designed to foster and sustain a professional community. However, administra-tors and teachers conceptualized, understood, and experienced community in different ways. Administrators saw communi-ty as a management tool to generate support for the school’s objectives. Teachers experienced community as social supportthat served as a remedy for professional isolation. Neither group based its view on community as a capacity-building, reflec-tive process leading to a generative professional community.

Suggested citation: Barnett, J. & Fallon, G. (2007). Conflicting Views of School Community: The DichotomyBetween Administrators and Teachers. International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership 2(1). Retrieved[DATE] from http://www.ijepl.org/.

IntroductionThis project originated as single-phase case study of oneteacher’s knowledge building through research that wasconducted entirely online (Barnett & Fallon, in press). Aclassroom teacher wanted to find ways to create communi-ty in her all-male 1st grade class. We had conceptualizedclassroom community as an educational setting with theprimary purpose of learning based on a set length of time(Cibulka & Nakayama, 2000). Informed by many authori-ties, from Rousseau and Dewey to Piaget and Vygotskii(Woods, 1999), we included membership (both teachersand learners), space (shared by the members), and demo-cratic decision making (enjoyed by all) in the notion ofcommunity.

We conducted the research entirely online as criticalfriends of the teacher, using e-mail messages, weekly chatsessions, and personal electronic journal entries, triangulat-ed by documentation on the Web site she had created todemonstrate her efforts and teaching documents she used.

Four domains developed in the teacher’s view of theclassroom community—trust, membership, power, andcapacity. The teacher’s perception of success appeared to

emanate from her belief that an adaptive community haddeveloped in her classroom and that her newfound abilityallowed her to negotiate the dialectics inherent in each ofthe four domains. For example, some of these dialecticalspaces involved the negotiation and substantiation of indi-viduality within collectivity, as well as self-interest along-side caring and discomfort furthering well-being.

However, as we worked on making meaning of theresults of the first phase of the study, we came to see thatthe story would not be complete unless, and until, we hadexplored how the domains we uncovered in that phasewere seen by teaching and administrative staff to be playedout in the school itself (Bolger, 2000; Bryk & Schneider,2003; Hogan, 2002; Mitchell & Sackney, 2000) in a secondcase study. We knew that a school’s culture is related to itsleadership (Schein, 1985) and the perceptions of its mem-bers. We wondered what would happen to other teachers’views of community when the 1st grade students went intotheir classrooms.Would their new teachers want to attemptto build their own knowledge about community? Wouldadministrators’ views of community differ in any ways fromthose of their teachers?

Conflicting Views of School Community: The Dichotomy Between Administrators and Teachers

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In the second phase of the research, we tried to cap-ture the teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of theways the school community functioned, both for thosewho worked within it and for those who were attemptingto create it. It began in the late summer of 2004 and con-cluded in the late spring of 2005. We began by approach-ing the school administrators, who talked at length abouttheir belief in, and support for, fostering community with-in the whole school. Five teachers out of eight in the earlyelementary grades also agreed to sit down and talk with usabout their ideas about, and experiences with, community.

Our purpose in this phase of the study was to betterunderstand the various views of community within theschool. We asked both teachers and administrators howthey conceptualized and experienced community, and wechallenged their assumptions to explore, in depth, theirperceptions and experiences.

Thus, this study is an attempt to understand the play-ers’ perceptions of community as it is rather than as itshould be. We wanted to examine these perceptions ofschool community because we did not accept the popularassumption that educational community is necessarily agood thing (Sergiovanni,1999), as we had learned from thefirst phase of the study that community has both benefitsand costs for individuals and groups.

Context of the StudyBoth phases of this study took place in an urban, privateday school for boys. We dealt with two sets of major stake-holders. One set was the school’s board of governors andadministrators. Their primary goal appeared to be to pro-tect the school’s position as a not-for-profit corporation ina quasi-educational marketplace. Another major stakehold-er, the teachers, was less affected by the school’s position asa corporation.

Within a quasi-educational marketplace, all privateschools have to stake out their territory, whether throughincreased access to learning technologies, small class sizes,exemplary teaching practices, or high success rates in post-secondary education and the job market.The board of gov-ernors and administrators (including the principal, viceprincipals, and chairs of various school committees) at thisschool had reacted to marketplace demands by increasingtheir commitment to an improved infrastructure (buildingand technology) and by overtly branding the school as acommunity. They attempted to accomplish this aimthrough a changed organizational structure intended toincrease collegiality among teachers and help them furthertheir work. The administrators’ apparent presumption wasthat organizational change at the macro level would shapeteachers’ interactions at the micro level, and professional

community would emerge.The school had implemented a “tribe” system in which

its elementary staff was divided into three tribes (early-,mid-, and late–elementary). These tribes were each given atribe office in which to work. Each teacher was providedwith a computer and work area in the tribe office, as wellas a laptop computer that could be taken to class. Theschool was served by its own network and educational andoffice software, as well as an internal, Web-based e-mailsystem for contact with parents and others and a networkorganizer that allowed all to schedule and communicatetheir personal and professional activities. Every classroomwas provided with an electronic whiteboard, a data projec-tion system, laptop computers, high-speed Internet connec-tions, and the like.Thus, the tools for a state of the art com-munication system, both for teachers and for parents, hadbeen provided to support a sense of community. In fact theprincipal said quite clearly, “consciously, we decided toorganize the physical organization of the building to con-tribute to that deeper and deeper pedagogical discoursegoing on.” He went on:

Facilities don’t make the program, but they makeit more pleasant. And this is about delivering aprogram. The objective here is bigger, better class-rooms, so we can deliver the program better; a big-ger, better library so we can facilitate [that] better;changing the dining hall [size] so we can changeour timetable to contribute to better learning.

Theoretical FrameworkThe theoretical frame used in this study was underpinnedby two main notions: personal knowledge and schoolcommunity. All teachers and administrators develop theirpersonal knowledge in the same way that all people cometo know the environment in which they live. This complexunderstanding can be better theorized using personal con-struct theory (Kelly, 1955) and teachers’ knowledge in itsvarious forms (Barnett & Hodson, 2001; Connelly &Clandinin, 1985; Elbaz, 1983; Schubert, 1992; Shulman,1987), including Claxton’s (1990) notion of personalminitheories. Ross, Cornett, and McCutcheon (1992) saythat teachers theorize professionally when they interactwith each other about pedagogy or schooling. Teachers’knowledge is, therefore, linked to community because theactions that come from it are often performed within it(Schubert & Ayer, 1992). To understand a community,therefore, one has to be aware of what its members knowof it.

Community is a socially constructed entity (Vygotskii,1978) composed of a collective of individuals in the sameplace at the same time. Struggle within that entity, whether

John Barnett and Gerald Fallon

over resources, power, status, gender or something else(finite but inherently valuable), creates a basis for conflict.Thus, the dynamic nature of a school community is one inwhich its members actively construct and reconstruct theirknowledge with each other through their contested interac-tions about education.

However, communities are not only in constant fluxbut also function in different ways. Irwin and Farr (2004)have called two such processes of community “adaptive”and “generative.” Adaptivity is a response to policies, mate-rials, or knowledge framed outside the community andimposed on it. For example, some administrators see andemploy communities as management tools. In this process,new knowledge is not created within the community butcomes down from above in what Clandinin and Connelly(1995, p. 9) call the “conduit.”The dynamic is one of power-over, top-down control. Such use of community as a toolemphasizes the importance of mobilizing teachers to assistin the delivery of programs and services or in the imple-mentation of external policies with a primary focus onrecruiting and energizing the community to assist in theseprocesses. Such a community is more involved in generat-ing first-order change, which consists of minor adjustmentsthat are not paradigmatic changes and do not change thesystem’s core functions (Fullan, 1991; Levy & Merry, 1986;Sheldon, 1980).

Generativity, or second-order change on the otherhand, occurs when community members not only definebut also solve their own problems. This notion requires thecommunity to have the capacity to mobilize its membersfor effective problem solving. In practice, it means that thecommunity must either have the knowledge, skills, andresources it requires, or it must be able to access them else-where. This new knowledge, required to set goals andstrategic directions, reasserts the community’s right to con-trol its own destiny and has to be created collectively with-in the community. Members have equal voice within adynamic of power-with, nonhierarchical control. A trulygenerative community may be more likely to engage in cre-ating second-order change in all of the following categories:

• The organizational paradigm, including theunderlying assumptions that shape perceptions,procedures, and behaviors in a school organiza-tion;• Organizational purpose and mission;• Organizational culture, which includes thebeliefs, values, and norms shared within theorganization; and• Functional processes that include organiza-tional structures, decision-making processes, andcommunication patterns (see Figure 1, page 9).

Generativity emerges from the freely expressed choicesmade by community members. Thus, the level of adaptivi-ty and generativity in a community can be understood bythe degree to which their members are empowered tomake meaningful choices and generate different types ofchange.

The range of change indicators provided by Levy andMerry’s (1986) model (see Figure 1) helps to identify pat-terns and themes that might, in turn, help to develop anunderstanding of the nature of changes in the organiza-tional behaviors and actions of members of an adaptive ora generative community.

Working entirely within the qualitative research para-digm, we took what teachers and administrators told usabout their community as their individual perceptions ofreality. We attempted to understand their personalminitheories of school community in the light of their per-sonal practical knowledge—understandings that had beenforged in their experiences at the school. By triangulatingtheir views against those of others and seeking out boththe commonalities and the differences, we developed ourown theory of the community process in that particularschool at that time.

MethodologyThis school was chosen as the site for our case studybecause it branded itself as an organization functioning asa professional learning community. Furthermore, over theyears, the administration of the school had created andimplemented an organizational structure allegedlydesigned to foster collegiality and community amongadministrative and teaching staff. The assumption made atthe time was that a collaborative organizational structurewould stimulate the emergence of collegial practices and acommunity model of interaction among educators.

Data for this project were collected through a series ofsemi-structured interviews. At the time of the study, eightfull-time teachers were employed in the early elementarygrades of the school. Questions were designed to elicitinformation about participants’ personal knowledge, under-standing, and experience of community. Two administra-tors—the principal and a vice principal—were interviewedon two occasions (prior to the school year and near theend of that year to see if anything had changed). Fourteachers were interviewed on one occasion near the end ofthe school year, and another teacher was interviewed twiceduring the year. Teacher interviews made up some 187minutes of recorded conversation. The interviews withadministrators made up approximately 144 minutes of con-versation. The interviewers asked for explanations for everyclaim made by a participant and attempted to reflect back,

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in their own words, the meanings offered by participants toensure they clearly understood what the participants wereactually expressing. As a further aid to their understanding,researchers sent the interviews to participants for memberchecking. Two participants took advantage of this processto change some of their wording slightly. Finally, theresearchers visited the school in person on two occasionsto note the physical structure, attend class sessions, meetwith various staff members, and observe the functioning ofthe institution.

It is crucial to understand the nature of the data thatwe present. We wanted to understand the ways that com-munity was known by these stakeholders. In other words,we wanted to get into their heads. We do not, however,attempt to claim that what we observed is what actuallyhappens in the day-to-day life of the school. So, we makeno claims that community is enacted in the ways that theparticipants described to us. However, we did use ourobservations, along with the opinions of administrators, tochallenge the views of teachers and to use the opinions ofteachers to challenge administrators in order to dig deeperinto their perceptions.

All interviews were recorded digitally and transcribedusing Express Scribe, version 4.01.The transcripts were ana-lyzed using ATLAS.ti, version 4.2. Data were analyzedqualitatively for emergent themes and patterns of common-alities and differences expressed by administrators andteachers.

Community in the SchoolIn the first phase of this study, four domains of communi-ty (trust, membership, power, and capacity) emerged in theteacher’s understanding of learning in community in herown classroom. Therefore, we started with those fourdomains to explore what it meant to be part of a schoolcommunity.As in our previous work, we again found “com-munity” was used as if it were a slogan (i.e., used by manypeople as if understood by all in the same way, yet notclearly defined and with multiple idiosyncratic meanings)which can be highly problematic. For one thing, we foundthat administrators and teachers appeared to be speakingin different languages when it came to the notion and pur-pose of community.

The principal of the school said that he had been thefirst one to float the notion of community: “The term thatcame to mind, and I am not sure its derivations, was a civilcommunity.” He alluded to “civil” as coming from “civility”;hence, civil community centered on maintaining a sense ofcivility within the school. It was implicit that such a senseof community emanated from his need to express an ethicof appropriate conduct in and around the school:

One measure of what civility would be, would besaying, “Good morning,” holding the door openfor somebody, or helping someone with their workor with a heavy package. But that in itself is notsufficient.That has to grow to an understanding inthe hallway, in the hockey rink, in the classroom,wherever it might be, so we recognize what con-duct is consistent with a civil community.

Thus we can see that the principal saw community as atool to support civility in a respectful and meaningful way.As he put it, “I then [started] to think how I would articu-late that [idea of civil community] in different forms withsmall groups, with parents, and ultimately in the largercommunity.” He put the idea into practice in the context ofathletics, where community was seen as a means to “edu-cate the parents as to their role and what they can do tocontribute to a healthy athletics program. Not questioningthe coach—these kinds of things.” Extending the notion, hesaid, “But like in any organization, whether a family or anorganization, it needs some vision and it needs some par-ticipatory leadership.” Clearly the principal saw it as his jobto provide the vision, and others would facilitate theprocess of implementing the idea. The principal claimed tobe the source of that vision: “Based on some conferences Ihad gone to and some educators I had been exposed towho would [have] talked about community, I guess, andcivility being important, and I put the two together.”

Nowhere in either administrator’s descriptions of com-munity did the notion of teachers’ voice arise as part of theadministration’s sense of what community meant to theschool. However, the principal did see the teachers asimplementers of the vision: “I mean, the administration ishere to support what the teachers want to do and shoulddo in class. Obviously, that means direction, vision, all ofthose things.”

Membership was fractured in the administrator’s viewof community.There did not appear to be just one commu-nity but several at different levels in the school hierarchy.The topmost level, policy-wise, was the school’s board ofgovernors. The principal took it as his job to take visionaryideas to the board, where policy would be decided:

We had, I guess, four or five significant boardretreats to look at the evolution of the school. Onepart of what you are seeing today, physically [theextensive renovations] is the result of a retreat wehad in 1997. Before we addressed other issues inthe school, [we needed] to address the facility.Instead of having a facilitator come, I said to theboard chair, “I think we can do this. The school[i.e., the administrative team] will put a proposalto the board as to where we would go.” . . . We


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demonstrated the thinking behind what we weretrying to do pedagogically, philosophically, and [Iexplained] how addressing the facilities wouldhelp us to do that. And it was a way to [accom-plish] what we did. We said, “This is a way tomanage the school. This is a way to deliver theprogram, and this is a way to support the schoolin the long run.”

Once decided at the board level, the rest appeared to himto be implementation through a hierarchy:

Administratively, we have three forums. There is aforum of division directors. I am one of those six.And I chair that meeting. Below that, there is agroup of about 12 who are what we call [consult-ants], and that is chaired by the director of stud-ies. And that’s where we do the nuts and bolts ofimplementing programs that have already beendecided upon in the other forum of division direc-tors. . . . And then the third forum is what we callthe management meeting, where it’s really logisti-cal and planning logistics. And those meet veryregularly. They’re chaired, and their agendas [areset]. . . . But why do I describe all that? It can con-tribute to, if you want, the understanding of whatgoes on in the organization. There’s a lot of peoplehearing the same thing at the same time.

All this language stood in stark contrast to what the teach-ers told us. They rarely mentioned board members oradministrators as members of the school community.Teacher after teacher talked about community amongstthemselves, although they sometimes included parents.

Teachers saw community in two structures—thetribes and the breakfast group. The tribes had their ownoffices where collegiality was fostered and expected. It wasa structure implemented by the administrative group fromthe vision that the top-level administrator had “sold” to theboard many years before. He said: “Just the way we’re struc-tured with the tribe system in the elementary permits quitea bit of that… [collegiality].” An administrator explainedwhere the idea had come from, “We . . . try to see some ofthe schools in and around the Boston area and Ontario.This [other school] was one of the schools where they havestructured their elementary school into tribes.We looked atit, and we thought that it would be interesting.”

In the same manner found by Magolda & Abowitz(1997) teachers in this study also viewed the tribes as com-munity. “People have talked about the tribe as being a com-munity . . . especially Tribe A.” Another teacher explained,“It is because we are all teaching the same range of agesand it’s easier to meet. It’s easier to meet the needs of the

children we teach because we all teach children about thesame age.”

The tribe as community, however, was not always seenas a good thing and, in fact, had some serious drawbacks.One teacher said:

But I do think that, that [the tribe system] is notthe right thing right now. The tribe itself is nice,but now we don’t talk to everyone else. We usedto all be in the same room where we would dis-cuss particular things. Now we are separated intothree different rooms and I find that it haschanged the dynamic of the teachers.

Another teacher noted, “We don’t see each other as much,and when we go to see someone in their own tribe office,they are working and we feel very guilty to just sit [there]and chitchat.” In other words, the tribe system has createdincentive to work in isolation. In fact, one teacher said thatthe tribe system was not an example of communitybecause it was “forced,” meaning that it was created in atop-down manner. Another teacher professed a view that,“It was not done to break our spirits. It was done to makesure we each had a place to work, and I guess we didn’texpect it would [make the teachers feel isolated].” Sheexplained that teachers are more committed to the tribesystem when it helps their work and less committed whenit does not.

There was a divergence of opinion between adminis-trators and teachers regarding the nature of community inthe tribe system currently used in only in grades 1 through6 in the K-12 school.A researcher asked, “So, would you saythe overall community… is grades 1 to 6; is that the natu-ral community? Or is the tribe the natural community?”The administrator opined, “I think the natural communityis the tribe.” No teachers concurred with that opinion. Thatis not to say that teachers saw the tribe system as havingno benefits. One said, “It’s become very personal becausewe have so much time together that we talk about everyaspect of our lives. So we know much more about the 10people in our room than we used to when there were 20,but [now] we don’t know anything about the others.”

However, other teachers discussed the negative andisolating effects of the implementation of the tribe systemby the administration and described how they reacted.One of the teachers explained that reaction:

So we, as adults, said, “If we don’t want this rela-tionship [with other teachers] to vanish, becausethat is what is happening, then we need to makea point of meeting every morning at 10 to 8:00 inthe staff room to make sure that we keep in touchor else we stay in front of our computers in our


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rooms and have no clue what’s happening with soand so’s life and so and so’s class.” I find we’remissing [something] because work is not justwork. It’s coming to work with friends and col-leagues and children. I find that this part is nowmissing [as a result of the tribe system].

Teachers went into far greater detail about their own com-munity, one that appears to have evolved in response to theisolation of the tribe system. One teacher said, “We justdecided, one day [that] we were very, very sad with the sit-uation and being all split. So we decided to just get a cof-fee in the morning. That is the only time that everybody isfree.” In fact, the breakfast group attempts to recreate theformer social community. One teacher said, “Yes—that iswhat we do now. So we decided to go down before thebeginning of the day, and we all sit together like before.”Another teacher said, “Having to look at the computer, withyour back to your colleagues [in the tribe office] and facingthe computer most of the time, we kind of lost some of thesocial interaction we used to have. We had to restore a newtradition.” Other teachers agreed that a replacement fortheir previous structures was needed:

It’s important for people to be together. It used tobe the coffee machine. It used to be the placewhere people gathered and we had a board, justthe simple things. It’s not like that anymore. Now,it’s e-mail, and that has made a huge difference inthe school. We used to have a big board in thestaff room, and every morning you had to go tolook at the board, which [you visited] to see if youwere on the “hit” list [i.e., a replacement for anabsent teacher]. So that was the reason you had togo to see [the bulletin board] or special notices orwhatever. So everybody had to go to the board inthe morning to start work [but we were also] ableto see people and to say, “Hi; did you watch TV lastnight?” or whatever. It’s nice to start your day likethat.

Almost every teacher mentioned the breakfast group as acommunity. The need for it seemed to stem from the nor-mal sense of isolation in teaching having been increased bythe tribe system. As one teacher noted:

It affects my work in a way that is not related tothe work because . . . I miss some people in thestaff room because I cannot talk to them or jokewith them all the time. When we have discus-sions, we all talk about the fact that we are split.

Thus, there seemed to be a divergence between the waythat administrators viewed community and the ways thatteachers viewed the construct.

Next, we set about linking these views with the com-ponents of community that had emerged from our previ-ous study. One of the most important components of com-munity is capacity development. When we looked at thedata, not surprisingly we found administrators talkingabout institutional capacity development far more thanteachers. The principal reflected on many ways that theschool’s capacity had built and saw the process of buildingit as a rational, top-down one:

The plan[ning] principle that we always used isthat we were not going to make a change until wefelt that we could succeed and it was based inresearch. So, with whatever we’ve done, we [have]tried to “sell it,” that (a) it is something we thinkwill improve the learning, [and] that (b) there isresearch and there is experience out there. Sowhen we present it, at least it has not [been] doneor perceived to [have been] done on a whim.

In contrast, teachers talked about the capacity developmentof the school as coming through their own work, such asstarting new programs, piloting new courses, and creatingelectronic projects. A teacher talked about working onadding a new program: “We were [there] all summer andwe had to buy everything from the floor to the furniture tothe report cards and curriculum.” One teacher saw admin-istrative support for special projects as building the school’scapacity: “I think that the administration is more support-ive. It has always been supportive for one [particular] proj-ect. But now, they are more supportive of such initiatives,and they work more with us to make sure that it will keepgoing.” However, there were few other comments express-ing that idea.

Teachers did see their interpersonal capacity improv-ing with the new emphasis on teamwork in the tribes:

I did work with a lot of people because I hadto. . . . I had a budget, so I worked with thebusiness office. I had to report to the elementaryschool administrator. I had to work with myteaching partner . . . so we [had to] meet in thesummer to discuss objectives and had to meetwith the art teacher [and] meet with the comput-er teacher to set up the whole curriculum becausewe had nothing. So it [was] mainly with theteachers who were already here or people whowere from the support staff and the business officeand things like that.

This point was echoed many times: Well, the school direction at that time was open togive us time to explore avenues, to have discus-sions among ourselves, [and] to work on [a


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curricular] project. For me and my other colleague,we were able to go to some conferences on thatmatter.

Collegiality (Jarzabkowski, 2002; Little, 1982) came prima-rily from the sharing of materials or ideas. One teacher said,“I’ve always been interested, not in competing with my col-leagues, but in sharing and being stimulated by my col-leagues.” A very few did mention a form of collegiality thatcame from coparticipation in work that required reflectiveinquiry. Collegiality was only mentioned by the principal inthe context of writing a mission statement and within theadministrative team. The other administrator seemed to bethe go-between for the administrative team and the teach-ers. Collegiality was a familiar refrain in the administrators’comments. The words used by that administrator includedsupport (“I wanted to support all of what she [a teacher]was involved in, and there was a lot, and she needed thatsupport.”) and promotion of collegiality (“With teachers, Isay, ‘You’re good at working with your partner, but then gobeyond that partnership.’”).

Often collegiality seemed to appear when innovationsin the best interests of the school were being promoted byadministrators. “When we started [one particular] project,we were able to go to conferences and school visits to seewhat already existed. We had the chance at that time tochoose from a variety on the market.”

In our first study, trust appeared as a central feature inthe creation of community. Only the principal, talked abouttrust as integrative (Macmillan, Meyer & Northfield, 2005),which means that it is based on the underlying principleson which an individual makes decisions. He used a hypo-thetical instance to describe a parent who had a concernabout the school and had spoken to a member of theboard of governors:

If that member of the board of [governors] is awell-informed, engaged member of the board,what he or she should be able to say, and we eventalk with them about this: “You should know . . .the personnel well enough, or certainly theadministrators in this school well enough, thatyou should be able to say to that person, ‘Youknow that doesn’t sound like so and so to me.That doesn’t sound like the way that [this school]would do things. I’ll look into it. I’ll get back toyou’”

He also talked about trust that came from position: “Sothat someone could say, ‘You know what, I just think thatthey’ll do the right thing or he’ll do the right thing or she’lldo the right thing.’” At least one teacher echoed role trust,“I trust the grade one teacher to do a good job. And I trust

the grade three teacher that they’ll do a good job and Ihope they trust me to do a good job.”

Teachers also talked about trust coming from knownprior practice, in this case, with a school administrator: “Iknow that with our immediate boss I definitely have asense that she taught for many, many years.” However,teachers most commonly described trust in general terms.One said, “It’s fundamental; it’s the base. If you don’t trustsomeone, I don’t think you can work with them honestly.”Another stated, “I think without trust there can’t be a com-munity within the school.”

Discussion There were obviously different views of community at playin the school, and we perceived some insularity betweenadministrators and teachers. Both groups were motivated tocreate community but for different purposes, functions, ororganizational outcomes. However, they appear to coexistwithin a hierarchically stratified school organization, andthe consequences of inhabiting one community as com-pared to the other were different in terms of the communi-ty’s status and level of contribution within the schoolorganization. We conceived the views held by teachers andadministrators of community in the school as a dichotomy(see Figure 1, page 9).

Administrators were in the business of “selling” com-munity as an instrument of management and capacitystrengthening. Along with rebuilding the school’s infra-structure, adding new technologies, and promoting proj-ects, community was part of the school’s brand for market-ing purposes. However, the administrators—especially theprincipal—still needed to maintain the tradition of theschool and used the image of community as a consensualgovernance tool (Little, 2002) and a commitment mecha-nism (Brint, 2001). In other words, what appeared to be acommunity-centered governance organization designed togenerate consensus seems to be used as a process to fosterthe views of the administrators’ community.

The administrators perceived the central communitymembers to be the principal and board members; that is,those with the ability to set and enforce policy in theschool. First on this list is the board of governors. As theprincipal said, “That’s where it starts, but the parents them-selves bought it [meaning a policy initiative the adminis-trators had proposed], and the teachers themselves.”

The administrators assumed a certain degree of homo-geneity in the nature of community. One said:

I got research and I did some presentations, pret-ty much on my own, [that] basically we neededthe classrooms at 612 square feet. So it was easy to


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say [to the board of governors], “Look, we arebelow standard. [The school] does not want to bebelow standard in any way.” That was an easy sell.

They assumed the right to be the dominant voice withinthe organization. When asked about his role, the principalsaid, “To try to ensure on a daily basis that we are makingprogress along that continuum . . . when I get up in themorning my job is to try to find out, one way or the other,how I can push along deeper and deeper pedagogical dis-course.” Thus, he held up a form of community that wasprone to conformism and used it to privilege certain valuesand assumptions, deemed essential, about the meaning ofeducating and being educated in the school. He alsoseemed to recognize that the existence of a multiplicity ofdemocratic decision-making communities within theschool might prevent such a dominant voice from develop-ing:

There would be some competing views. I would-n’t think really substantial. For example, we had adebate 12 or 13 years ago on whether we wouldbecome a coeducational school—significantdebate within the community. We made a deci-sion on that. So, those kinds of things exist. Oncethe decision is made, we’re going to go forward.

Administrators saw the tribes that they had created as theprimary communities of teachers and supported thosecommunities by providing group offices, enhanced elec-tronic communication, and support for those teacher initia-tives they thought would brand the school better. However,the tribes did not generate their own ideas, plan them, orenact them democratically. They received policies anddirection (vision) from above and did their best to carrythem out. The teachers, on the other hand, did not see thetribes in the glowing light portrayed by administrators.Furthermore, they did not consider the tribe as their pri-mary community, even though they recognized that thetribe system helped them work better with their immedi-ate colleagues. They felt, rather than saw, the isolation cre-ated by the tribe system because it separated them fromcolleagues that they had enjoyed interacting with over theyears. The tribe was great at facilitating top-down commu-nication and helping to make collaborative work more effi-cient, but it also took away opportunities to interact profes-sionally with teachers who were working with students ofdifferent ages.

The purpose of community for the teachers was shar-ing knowledge and providing support to one another. Wesaw this purpose in the response of the teachers in creat-ing their own ad hoc community centered on meeting forbreakfast every morning. This ritual occasion cemented

group identity and strengthened individuals’ sense of vital-ity, safety, and comfort. The fact that teachers would cometo school especially early every morning is an indicationthat they perceived a lack in generative community in theschool but still needed it. The administrators knew of andtolerated this democratically based, open, social communi-ty but did not participate in it.

The dimensions of school community were expressedby administrators and teachers in diverse ways: work,organization, collegiality, and trust. The first dimension wasthat of work. Administrators saw community as a way tohelp teachers work better for the school. They provided themeans to do that work more efficiently. The tribe officeswere well appointed, and teachers were provided with hightechnology that rivaled that of a small college. On the otherhand, teachers saw their work in terms of their work witheach other, with their students, and with the administration,board, and parents.

The way that work was seen changed the very natureof the community experience.When people work “for” oth-ers, they are less invested in the process of community.They need rewards for participating. We saw a great differ-ence in the level of investment among the teachers. Thoseteachers who had conceived individual initiatives that weresupported by the administration talked about the value ofthe tribe more than those who had not been so blessed.Some of those teachers even went so far as to reject thenotion of community itself while promoting one-to-onepartnership for collaborative work. However, they all partic-ipated in the breakfast community. When they worked“with” each other in creating their own space, all wereinvested.

The second dimension that we saw was that of organ-ization. Administrators tended to see school community asthe vertical interaction of groups, while the teachers sawtheir own breakfast community as horizontal. When thegroups interacted vertically, the teachers were the receiversof top-down knowledge from the board through theadministrative team. The focus of this knowledge was onproducing short-term results for external audiences (suchas parents) in the educational marketplace. Thus, theadministration supported projects that had external fund-ing and resulted in curricular products that made theschool appear in a favorable light to the outside world;products that could be created in a span of a few years atmost. All dialogue was driven by the needs of the school ina competitive world.

Collegiality was also seen differently by the twogroups. The administrative promotion of “community”emphasized the importance of mobilizing teachers to assist


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in the delivery of programs and services and engage exclu-sively in generating first-order change within the school,while the community made up of administrators andmembers of the board maintained a monopoly over theexpertise and capacity to generate second-order changesuch as changing goals and strategic directions of theschool.

Teachers saw their social community as horizontal.They believed themselves to be dynamic actors in theirown community. They made the decisions, and theyengaged in dialogue. Their community was not intended tocreate anything but rather to define a space where each wassupported and felt good. Many teachers saw the communi-ty as a haven that would be ongoing.

Finally, we found trust to be a cornerstone of commu-nity, one that we also found at the foundation of our earli-er study. We contend that community simply cannot existwithout trust in some form, at some level, expressed insome way. Administrators believed that trust was based ontheir roles, integrated into the underlying principles onwhich they operated and which they made clear to teach-ers and others. Thus, they hoped for trust from theiremployers and employees. They expressed trust in terms ofthe simple expectation of others that they, asadministrators, had both good skills and good intentions to

do the right thing. Teachers, on theother hand, tended to see trust basedon their prior experience with partic-ular individuals and their own lifeexperience with people and otherteachers in general. They expressedtrust in terms such as knowing whoto trust and how to work with thosethey did not feel comfortable trusting.

End Results Needless to say, the two views of com-munity led to different outcomes.Administrators hoped that communi-ty would not challenge the status quoof the school. The capacity of theschool would hopefully be strength-ened for the competition with otherprivate schools, but the school itselfwould not change in any fundamentalway. Thus, we claim that their view isone of strengthening the capacity ofthe school to accomplish its task. Thegrowth in their personal and interper-sonal capacity would only make them

better, more effective administrators. Teachers, by contrast,saw their community as building their personal and inter-personal capacity. True, they were only rebuilding whatthey had lost, but it was still capacity building in whichthey were engaged.

Both groups accepted the way that things were organ-ized and that events would be played out at the school asthey had always been. The changes that both administra-tors and teachers created and experienced simply tinkeredwith the structure rather than changing it. The school wasphysically altered but retained single-teacher classroomsthat followed the same government-prescribed curricula.The communication system and the teaching technologiesbecame electronic. The breakfast community did not seekto engage in second-order change, only to rekindle thesense of social community that had been lost.

Final Thoughts We had originally come to the school to understand theways that a teacher developed her understanding and per-ception of what it meant to be educated, and to educate,within a community.We expected that such change wouldbe an exploration of community as expressed in the litera-ture: that community was a good thing.

Figure 1: Dichotomy Between Administrators’ and Teachers’ Views of Community


Community was far more complex than we had antic-ipated, and it was not always a “good thing” for individuals.The form of community promoted by the school adminis-tration is prone to restrictive conformism and a certaindegree of intolerance toward second-order change. Such aconception of community might be detrimental for somepeople because it could place constraints on individualvoices, empowerment, and levels of contribution within theschool. In addition, the school’s organization was highlyrobust, and civil community easily constrained any linger-ing effects from the first classroom we studied. In fact, thechange hardly created the equivalent of a blip on the radar.In our second phase, no participant even mentioned a sin-gle problem created by the adaptive classroom communityof the 1st grade teacher with her students in the first phaseof our study. It had been a temporary, first-order change,and the students had simply moved back into traditionalclasses.

With so much hyperbole surrounding the creation ofcommunity in schools, we want to caution the reader tonote that schools and teachers have often been highlyresistant to change perhaps for good reason (Hall & Hord,1984; Zembylas, 2003), that community is a very complexphenomenon that is perceived in different ways by differ-ent people; and that the term itself can be used to decoratetraditional power arrangements. We have to remain awarethat, to nurture the emergence of learning communities,change agents should establish new political relationsamong school administrators and teachers in a horizontalfashion, rather than a vertical one.

For us, the concept of school as community is funda-mentally identified with plurality, not with commonality.This school was not one community because there wasmore than one in evidence to us.Therefore speaking of oneschool community or labeling different phenomena withthe same name would be very misleading. In this study, thenotion of community was experienced by teachers as on-the-job relationships among themselves. However, the con-text in which the teachers experienced “their” communityalso included administrators who saw steerage and policydirections as unquestionably theirs to frame.

The different versions of community experienced byteachers and administrators in the same school at the sametime highlights a much more attenuated and provisionalnature of community in which the main pattern of interac-tion is coexistence rather than collaboration or collegiality.From this standpoint, we must always ask who is seekingto foster a sense of community, with whom, and why.

The ideal of community within a school should bequestioned and made problematic because the term iswidely used in both educational leadership and change lit-erature, and it often appears to imply an unstated, unques-tioned notion that schools should be communities of somesort if they are to be deemed innovative, effective, andresponsive.What this study taught us, as researchers, is thatindividuals working in a school may be drawn together byquite different purposes and held together by quite differ-ent threads. Encompassing terms like “community” canmake groups whose inner dynamics and intentions arequite different from one another appear similar from theoutside simply because they exist side by side within acommon, collaborative organizational structure (Abowitz,1999).

There are several problems with the contention thatschools or classrooms should be learning communities andthese merit further research. For example, does conceptual-izing schools as communities obscure the significantly dif-ferent ways in which innovative and effective administra-tive practices, learning, and teaching occur? Does fosteringcommunity take away time or resources from other, moreworthwhile, initiatives? More research is needed to developa fuller understanding of the ways communities emergenaturally within schools and how they favor some individ-uals and marginalize others. Finally, we might inquire if, infact, the traditional association of community with collab-orative organizational structure, proximity, and familiaritycan be an impediment to the formation of authentic com-munities.

Ultimately, we hope this study has cast some light onwhat community has meant to teachers and administratorsin one school in hopes that it can help illuminate the prob-lematic nature of the notion itself.

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conflict views of school community

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