introduction - research.manchester.ac.uk · web viewa conceptual map of the scholarly literature...

Conceptualising school-community relations in disadvantaged

neighbourhoods: mapping the literature

Kirstin Kerr, Alan Dyson and Frances Gallannaugh

Centre for Equity in Education, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Correspondence: Kirstin Kerr, [email protected]

Centre for Equity in Education, Ellen Wilkinson Building, The University of

Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research

Council Connected Communities scoping studies programme (Grant AH/J500999/1).

Word count

Structured abstract: 482

Text: 8,241

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mailto:[email protected]

Conceptualising school-community relations in disadvantaged

neighbourhoods: mapping the literature

Structured abstract

Background. The field of school-community relations is well established in the

scholarly literature. However, its largely descriptive and fragmented nature has

served to disguise its conceptual complexity. To date, the sets of assumptions

about school-community relations which underpin the literature, and the

opportunities, tensions, and limitations inherent in these, have tended to remain

implicit. Consequently, while stronger school-community relations have typically

been seen as desirable – and especially so as a mechanism for tackling

neighbourhood disadvantage – the more contentious issues of what, precisely,

they should be seeking to achieve, how, and whose values they should promote,

have far less often been discussed. This paper foregrounds these issues.

Purpose. A conceptual map of the scholarly literature on school-community

relations is developed, surfacing the sets of understandings embedded in the field

by academic authors. The map is intended to act as a heuristic tool, helping

readers to navigate and critique the field and to identify gaps in the literature

which must now be addressed.

Design and methods. A review was undertaken of the subset of the school-

community literature concerned with the role of schools in relation to

geographically-located communities experiencing economic and associated forms

of disadvantage. The scholarly literature published in English since 1990 was

searched, using strings of search terms representing ‘school’ + ‘community’ +

‘disadvantage’. A process of conceptual synthesis was used to surface the

understandings embedded in the literature, with sixty texts being read and

summarised in detail by a minimum of two reviewers. Two external advisory

groups of academic experts (a UK-based cross disciplinary group, and an

international group of education specialists) supported the review process by

identifying relevant literatures in their specialist fields and national contexts, and

by challenging and elaborating the reviewers’ emerging interpretations of

understandings embedded in the literature.

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Conclusions. The field is dominated by texts which take for granted the leading

role of professionals (for instance teachers, principals, public service officers, and

policy makers) acting on agendas determined outside communities, and which

have a tendency to cast communities in the largely passive role of responding to

school-initiated interventions. A smaller subset of literature focuses on

community-initiated actions and most often reports examples of parents

developing programmes to support students’ learning. While these offer

important critiques of professional, deficit-driven conceptualisations of

communities, they still tend to locate communities as supporting professional

agendas rather than as having opportunities to shape these from a community

standpoint.

The field is also dominated by accounts of ameliorative actions taken to

alleviate the acute symptoms of underlying disadvantage and there are very few

accounts of actions seeking to transform local circumstances by tackling

underlying inequalities. This weighting may reflect the opportunities for action

most readily available to schools and communities wishing to tackle

neighbourhood disadvantage. The most productive avenues for future research

may therefore lie in exploring how possibilities for ameliorative action can be

strengthened and can bring together professional and community perspectives.

Keywords: school-community relations, neighbourhoods, disadvantage.

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Introduction

School-community relations in disadvantaged neighbourhoods have become an

increasingly contentious issue in recent years. Although strong connections have

typically been seen as desirable, there is growing concern internationally that these are

becoming progressively weaker, and particularly so in light of the trend towards the

neo-liberal marketization of school systems. Such concerns have, moreover, been

exacerbated since the global economic crisis, as growing inequalities, coupled with

reductions in public services, present ever greater challenges for schools serving

disadvantaged neighbourhoods (see further Kerr et al. 2014, Lipman 2011, 2015).

Against this backdrop, important and timely questions are being raised about the roles

that schools and communities working together might play in addressing neighbourhood

disadvantage.

To inform debates around these issues, this paper develops a conceptual map of

the scholarly literature on school-community relations. This map is deliberately

intended as a heuristic tool which readers can use both to identify possibilities for

developing school-community relations and to critique the understandings embedded in

the field. Accordingly, the map has two elements, and is, to the authors’ knowledge, the

first map of the field of its kind. The first presents an ordered account of the substantive

forms school-community relations are reported to take. The second is conceptual,

concerned to bring to the surface the understandings embedded in the literature by

academics writing about school-community relations. Mapping these dual elements is

essential because, while the field is well established, its largely descriptive and

fragmented nature has long-served to disguise its conceptual complexity. To date,

assumptions made in the literature about the nature of school-community relations, and

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the opportunities, tensions, and limitations inherent in these, have rarely been brought to

the surface and made subject to scrutiny. This has created a situation where insufficient

attention has been paid to the contentious issues of what, precisely, school-community

relations should be seeking to achieve, how, and whose values they should promote.

In response, this paper specifically maps the subset of the school-community

literature concerned with the role of schools in relation to geographically-located

communities which experience economic and other associated forms of disadvantage.

This literature typically uses ‘community’ to refer, for example, to the residents of an

inner-city neighbourhood or an isolated town experiencing economic decline, and

schools are typically presented as serving the communities in which they are located.

This simple spatially-oriented understanding is not without its difficulties – not least

because there is a tendency to treat communities as homogenous entities, and to ignore

the dynamics of school choice in weakening neighbourhood ties. But these limitations

notwithstanding, the literature suggests that there is something about the shared

experience of living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood which needs to be addressed at

the collective level of ‘the community’, and that developing closer school-community

relations can provide a valuable mechanism for promoting the resilience, well-being and

sustainability of these communities.

The paper is structured as follows. A brief introduction to the literature on

school-community relations in disadvantaged geographical communities is provided,

demonstrating its diverse nature and the need for a critical overview of the field. The

processes of conceptual synthesis, used to review the literature, are then outlined. The

conceptual mapping framework developed through this synthesis is then presented and

populated using the literature. The concluding section considers the implications of this

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conceptual map for the field’s development.

School-community relations in disadvantaged neighbourhoods: a diverse field

Across the OECD countries, the weight of evidence clearly suggests that poor

educational outcomes are spatially concentrated, and most strongly so in the poor urban

neighbourhoods of major cities and de-industrialised towns (Kerr et al. 2014). Schools

have been suggested to have distinct roles to play in breaking these patterns, being at

once community spaces and places, deeply embedded in, shaped by, and responsive to

complex neighbourhood dynamics; but also major national institutions, with the task of

connecting local communities to wider social, economic and political contexts. This

dual nature has been reflected in education policy internationally. On the one hand,

education systems have seen repeated efforts to enable schools to compensate for

students’ educational disadvantages through improved pedagogy, organisation and

leadership, while on the other, attempts have been made to involve schools in more

community-oriented strategies aimed at tackling disadvantages at their supposed source,

in families and neighbourhoods – as seen, for instance, in the widespread promotion of

‘extended’, ‘full-service’, and ‘community’ schools (Cummings et al. 2011).

Important as these policy approaches have been, it is arguable that they have

been based on distinctly impoverished notions of the dynamics of geographical

communities (and particularly those experiencing disadvantage), and of the actual and

potential interactions between schools and the communities they serve (see, for

instance, Lupton [2010]). Put simply, to date, it is suggested that policy has

demonstrated a strong tendency either to cast communities as characterised only by

deficits which schools and other public services need to make good, or to write them out

of the picture entirely (Cummings et al. 2011).

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However, it is also clear that no matter how impoverished conceptualisations of

school-community relations may have been, alternative approaches are possible. The

evidence is that there have been occasions, historically, where much richer

understandings have informed policy (see, for instance, Morris [1925] on Village

Colleges), and there are administrations where real efforts have been made to escape

dominant deficit conceptualisations (see, for instance, Tymchak [2001]). There are also

research traditions which credit communities with greater agency in their own

development and which therefore see the role of schools in more complex, interactive

terms. For instance, Dyson and Robson (1999) identified a critical tradition in the UK

literature which focused on the power imbalance between community members and

professionals and sought ways to redress this.

Recent years have also seen a growing interest in ‘asset-based’ approaches as to

how public services can support community development (Foot and Hopkins 2010;

Glickman and Scally 2008; Shirley 2001). In the USA in particular, attention is being

paid to the possibilities presented by ‘community organising’ and the construction of a

new politics in the relationship between communities and schools (Mediratta et al. 2009,

Warren and Mapp 2011). There is also evidence that schools can function as places

where community identities (and particularly those of marginalised communities) can

be affirmed and communities can be empowered (Morris 2004, Richardson 2009).

As this demonstrates, a wide range of contrasting understandings have been

embedded in efforts to strengthen school-community relations in order to address

neighbourhood disadvantage. Together, these understandings also point to a range of

potential tensions, which both threaten existing school-community relations and open

up possibilities for new sets of relationships to emerge. Tensions between professional

(for instance, teachers, principals, public service officers and policy makers) and

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community interests, local and national concerns, deficit- and asset-based

understandings of community, and local cultural validation and the promotion of

dominant societal values, are all implicit within the field, but are rarely made explicit.

Researchers have occasionally sought to surface these issues in relation to specific

concerns, as, for instance, in Schutz’s (2006) critique of traditional conceptualisations of

community engagement, or in Morris’ critique of deficit perspectives on schools serving

African-American communities (Morris 2004). However, given the diversity of issues

and stances which characterise the field, it is essential to move beyond these isolated

critiques of particular positions to create a critical map of the field as a whole – a task to

which this paper now turns.

Methods

The research underpinning this paper was undertaken to create a conceptual map of the

scholarly literature on school-community relations in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. A

focus on the scholarly literature helps to ensure the rigour of the literature reviewed,

especially when compared to many of the ‘advocacy pieces’ found in the non-academic

literature (Cummings et al. 2011). However, it also inevitably reflects the field’s current

limitations, especially in reporting authentic community perspectives (including, for

example, the lack of scholarly literature authored, or even co-authored, by community

members).

A process of ‘conceptual synthesis’ (Gough et al. 2012, Nutley et al. 2002a) was

used to review the field. The aim of a conceptual synthesis is ‘not to provide an

exhaustive search and review of all the literature published in a field [but] to identify the

key ideas, models and debates, and review the significance of these for developing a

better understanding…’ (Nutley et al. 2002b, 2). Reviews of this kind interrogate the

literature in terms of their underlying conceptualisations and make these explicit, adopt

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search procedures guided by the need to identify different kinds of conceptualisation,

and synthesise the literature by grouping it into ‘families’, which are characterized by

the use of similar conceptual frameworks.

In practice, the review process began with the three authors of this paper, as

reviewers, identifying known key texts (scholarly books or articles) in the field which

embody different conceptualisations of school-community relations (including, for

instance, cultural validation and asset-based and deficit-oriented perspectives, as

outlined earlier). They then compared other texts with these starting points to consider

whether these embodied similar or different conceptualisations. In each instance, the

review focused on the conceptualisations implied by the substantive forms of school-

community relations being reported, and the ways in which the author(s) of each text

had characterised and commented upon these. For the most part, author’s commentaries

were largely uncritical of the conceptualisations implied. However, where authors

explicitly brought to the surface the conceptualisation implied by a particular form of

action, and also offered an alternative critical interpretation, both kinds of

conceptualisation were noted.

Throughout the review process, texts were read by two (of the three) reviewers,

who sought to bring underlying conceptualisations to the surface by identifying and

characterising the substantive forms of school-community relations reported, the

purposes attributed to these, how these were developed or driven, and what this

suggested about the nature of the relationship between schools and communities. They

then compared their interpretations and sought to articulate the actual and potential

relationships between the different conceptualisations identified. Two external advisory

groups were also established: a cross-disciplinary group, with seven UK academics

from across human geography, social anthropology, sociology, and social policy, and an

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international group of five education academics based in Sweden, the Netherlands,

Australia, Canada and the USA. Their roles were to identify relevant literatures in their

specialist fields and national contexts to help ensure that no conceptually important texts

were missed, and to challenge and elaborate the reviewers’ emerging interpretations of

the conceptualisations embedded in the literature.

The search engines of The University of Manchester Library and databases

including ERIC (Education Resource and Information Centre) were used to search the

literature. Strings of search terms were employed which included ‘school’ +

‘community’ (or a spatially-oriented synonym, for example, ‘area’, ‘neighbourhood’,

‘district’, ‘place’) + ‘disadvantage’ (or a synonym, for example, ‘deprivation’,

‘poverty’). Searches were also restricted to the scholarly literature in English after 1990

– though where key texts predating this were known or widely referenced, these were

also included. Further literature searches combining ‘school’ and a search term

indicating action for specific purposes, (‘regeneration’, ‘renewal’, ‘community

development’, ‘community organising’), were also conducted.

These initial searches identified approximately 1,400 texts. The reviewers then

focused specifically on the literatures identified which detailed where actions were

proposed, or had been undertaken, to develop school-community relations to tackle

disadvantage at a neighbourhood level. This meant that the literature identified in the

initial searches was excluded if, for instance, it simply reported disadvantaged

communities’ attitudes to education, or targeted single-issue initiatives (for example, an

initiative to support teenage mothers in school), or internal school improvement

measures taken by neighbourhood schools. Such articles accounted for much of the

literature.

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The review process stopped when further literature searches failed to add to the

conceptual map developed. In total, detailed summaries of 60 texts were produced

which enabled different conceptual standpoints to be identified and elaborated. These

texts were drawn predominantly from the UK and USA, and to a lesser extent Australia,

reflecting these countries’ relative prominence in the English-language literature in this

field. It is also important to note that these contexts have some significant variations

which may inform different conceptualisations of school-community relations. For

instance, in the USA, the intersection between race and poverty, coupled with high

concentrations of inner-city poverty (Brookings Institute 2016), is reflected in a body of

literature on schools serving inner-city Black and Latino communities, and on responses

to the ghettoization and gentrification of these communities. Themes of residualisation

and gentrification are also found in the UK literature for instance, but the relationship

between poverty and ethnicity, and the characteristics of disadvantaged

neighbourhoods, are much more varied and nuanced (Garner and Bhattacharyya 2011).

Developing a mapping framework

For a conceptual map of the field to be successful, there needs to be an underpinning

framework which can allow the understandings surfaced in the literature to be located

and understood in relation to one another. To achieve this, and create a set of common

reference points, the framework must present a somewhat simplified account of highly

complex ideas, precisely so that it can capture the field’s diversity.

The mapping framework presented here has two component parts. The first

draws attention to the types of substantive approaches or actions purposefully taken to

link schools and disadvantaged geographical communities, and in doing so, tackle

disadvantage at a neighbourhood-level. The second explores what the literature says

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about the understandings embedded in these actions. To do this, it employs an analytical

framework which poses two broad questions of the literature, namely:

(1) Where does the literature suggest the impetus for action comes from and

who holds the power in school-community engagement activities?

(2) What does the literature suggest are the purposes of action, and what

social stances does it embody?

This dual focus arises from the review’s finding that broad forms of substantive action

have been conceptualised in different ways. For instance, community members’

involvement in school governance has been reported variously by academic authors as

having the potential to subjugate community interests to those of professionals (Ranson

and Crouch 2009), to empower communities and strengthen democratic processes (Gold

et al. 2002), and a wide variety of stances in-between. The map’s component parts,

elaborated below, seek to enable such variations to be captured, while still enabling a

comprehensive overview of the field to be developed.

Actions developing school-community relations in disadvantaged

neighbourhoods

In reviewing the literature, eight broad types of action were identified. These are

broadly characterized below. It is important to be clear that while these activities are not

mutually exclusive – nor indeed, exclusive to disadvantaged neighbourhoods – they

have nonetheless been reported as distinct mechanisms for developing relations between

schools and disadvantaged geographically-located communities.

(1) Schools as providers of services and facilities

There is a substantial international literature about the role of schools in providing, or

acting as a base for the provision of, a wide range of services and facilities to

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geographically-located disadvantaged communities. These can include, for example,

parenting support and childcare, access to health care, benefits advice and housing

services, adult learning, and community leisure, library and computing facilities. Such

schools are frequently termed ‘full-service’, ‘extended’ or ‘community’ schools

(Cummings et al. 2011). Mirón (2003) argues that such schools can act to relieve social

pressures by engaging in inter-organisational collaboration, a view supported by Warren

(2005) when suggesting that community schools can provide the strongest direct

support systems for children, meeting basic welfare needs in disadvantaged

communities.

(2) Schools developing communities’ social and civic capacity

A smaller body of literature focuses on school-led activities which explicitly aim to

build positive relationships, social networks and a sense of cohesion and pride within

communities. These may concentrate on building interpersonal ‘social capital’, defined

as ‘strong relationships based on trust and cooperation among teachers, principals,

parents and community residents’ (Warren 2005, 137). Often, these are reported to

focus on the development of shared expectations for children’s learning and attainment,

and ‘how families and communities can marshal social resources to enhance students’

academic endeavours’ (Gonzalez and Moll 2002, 626). They can also be more

reciprocal in their conceptualisation of the relationship between schools and

communities, with schools seeking to support students’ wider relationships in

alternative community settings, with families, friends, neighbours, churches and youth

associations (Timpane and Reich 1997).

The development of social capital is additionally presented as a starting point for

developing civic capacity – namely relationships between community institutions.

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Goldring and Hausman (2001), for example, use the term ‘civic capacity’ to

conceptualise the ability to create alliances among institutions working towards a

community-building goal. They suggest that school principals, in particular, ‘can

develop civic capacity by forming partnerships to garner additional resources from the

business community and by serving as central members of key stakeholder groups. [In

doing so] principals must work closely with community and social agencies that assist

students and their families’ (Goldring and Hausman 2001, 194).

(3) Schools supporting the development of community infrastructures

A small but distinctive strand in the literature suggests that schools can play an integral

role in the development of community infrastructures, in particular, relating to

economic and housing development. Taken in turn, the literature on economic

development typically views economic rather than social factors as being at the root of

problems in poor neighbourhoods, and the amelioration of social problems as therefore

dependent on economic development. Consequently, the focus of action is on the

community as an economic system, with schools playing roles including: acting as

labour market intermediaries and linking students’ aspirations to economic growth

sectors (Kerchner 1997), co-ordinating learning opportunities with local economic

development needs (Crowson and Boyd 2001, Mitra et al. 2008), and contributing to the

local economy when purchasing goods and services and employing local people

(Kretzman 1992).

Literature on housing and schooling is typically more concerned with

influencing general community conditions, and in particular local demographics, in

order to affect social and economic development. For example, Chung (2002) argues

that the development of affordable housing can be co-ordinated with the development of

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school facilities to create a market for housing and reduce high student mobility rates.

Joseph and Feldman (2009) suggest that schools can then help to sustain planned mixed

income communities by using their position in the community and resources to help

build a collective community identity.

(4) Schools developing community-responsive curricula and pedagogy

There is a strand in the literature which focuses on area-based curricula and pedagogy.

In this approach, community is understood in terms of the history and experience of

people living in the area served by a school, and of the opportunities available there.

Schools, sometimes working in partnership with non-government organisations, are

reported to integrate this history, experience and range of opportunities into their

curricula and pedagogical approaches, with this validating, or ‘recognising’ local culture

(Gonzalez and Moll 2002, Thomas 2011). It is widely argued that actions of this type

must go beyond simple forms of ‘recognition’. For example, Moll et al. (1992)

distinguish between schools’ efforts to establish more ‘symmetrical’ relationships with

students and other community members by situating themselves as partners in the co-

construction of knowledge, and what they term a ‘culture-sensitive curriculum’ which

relies on ‘folkloric displays, such as storytelling, arts, crafts and dance performance’

(Moll et al. 1992, 139). Others (see for example Buras [2009], Ladson-Billings [1994],

Schutz [2006]) make a more explicit case for the liberatory potential of schooling where

community knowledge is used to critique dominant perspectives and to help enable the

empowerment of students who are marginalised by disadvantage.

(5) Community members’ involvement in school governance

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There is a literature (though little is specifically on disadvantaged communities) about

the formal involvement of community members in the leadership and management of

schools, and the formal mechanisms through which community members can hold

schools to account. Within this, there are few texts that develop conceptualisations of

the potential of governance in any depth. Those which do typically present the ideal of

lay community members’ participation in school governance as ‘a powerful exercise in

civic participation and a major aspect of a democratic society where collective activities

are valued as much or more than the rights of individuals to do as they wish in the

educational or any other market place’ (Deem 1994, 34).

Providing more specific accounts, Sheard and Avis (2011) present an

‘aspirational’ perspective on school governance, the purposes of which include

‘enabling the community the school serves to meet their needs and have greater control

over decision making processes that affect their lives as learners’ (2011, 94). Focusing

on parents as community members, Shatkin and Gershberg (2007) propose a conceptual

framework which describes the potential impacts of parent participation in three areas:

curriculum and pedagogy that better meets the needs and capacities of communities,

collaborative decision making which can enhance school-community relations (leading

to improved educational performance), and community involvement around issues

outside schools including physical redevelopment and service provision.

(6) Community organising

There is a small but very specific body of literature, almost exclusive to the USA, on

community organising. This is a mechanism, often led by trade unions and professional

advocacy organisations (typically companies or charities which provide training and

support services for organising), to mobilise the interests and power of community

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members in order to make community groups the primary agents for educational

reform. Community in this sense is understood in relation to collective interests and

power in under-resourced areas where people are negatively affected by a broad range

of social and economic inequalities.

Schutz (2006) suggests that what clearly distinguishes community organising

from other forms of action is that participants ‘come to the table as members of an

external institution rooted in the community and specifically designed to give them

power’ (719). Similarly, Shirley (2001) presents community organisers as most

interested in the enhancement of political capacity which can be used to change schools,

with parental involvement in schools interwoven into a larger agenda of cultivating

political leadership in low income communities.

(7) Parental choice

There is a literature around the marketization of education and the role that parental

choice plays in this. Two broad assumptions underpin this. The first, as Ranson (2008,

11) states, is that ‘achievement is improved through strong independent institutions

which compete effectively in the market place of parental choice’. The second is that

parents will actively participate in this market place and in doing so will share its values

(Anderson 1998). While market mechanisms are often associated with the

fragmentation of school-community relations, they are also presented as particularly

important in disadvantaged communities in providing a lever for school improvement,

and thereby offering families a means of accessing ‘high quality’ schooling (Allen

2013). There is, however, also a critical literature which suggests that parental choice

acts to reinforce residential inequalities and increase social segregation between schools

(see further Allen 2013).

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(8) Communities establishing schools

Policies which have allowed communities to found new schools, lying outside existing

educational arrangements, have received some attention in the literature. This is most

substantial with regard to the Charter School movement in the USA (see, for instance,

Allen [2010]) in instances where Charter Schools have been established in

disadvantaged communities with the support of trade unions, businesses or other

external organisations. In the field of school-community relations, literature typically

focus on those Charters with a community-orientation and an underpinning set of

values, and sometimes pedagogical approaches, intended to unite the school and

community and engage parents in the school. Compared to a ‘full-service’, ‘community’

or ‘extended’ model of schooling, this suggests a more direct role for schools as agents

for community development.

Purpose and social stance

Having set out the range of actions and approaches reported in the literature, an

analytical framework is now needed to allow their underpinning assumptions to be

surfaced and mapped in relation to one another. The framework proposed here is

presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. approximately here

This framework takes the form of a set of intersecting dimensions against which

literature can be situated. The first dimension, ‘power and control’, is used to explore

whose interests academic authors report as driving efforts to develop school-community

relations. The second dimension, ‘social stance’, explores the purposes they attribute to

these efforts. These are elaborated below.

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(1) Power and control

This dimension invites questions about: Who sets the agenda for efforts to develop

school-community relations? Whose interests are being served? Who has the power to

take action, and who has the power to stop these actions working as anticipated? It is

suggested to have two poles. At one end are ‘exogenous agendas’ – i.e. those which are

determined outside communities. These represent the understandings of policy makers

or other ‘external agents’ or professionals, rather than understandings grounded in the

‘lived experiences’ of community members. These ‘lived experiences’ are at the other

end of the pole, labelled ‘endogenous agendas’. This refers to ‘grass roots’,

‘community-generated’ agendas, determined by the needs and interests of community

members.

In setting out these poles, the implication is that ‘exogenous’ and ‘endogenous’

agendas are opposing – and, indeed, they may conflict. But even at the extremes, this is

not necessarily so. Even if separately formulated and clearly located at either end of the

continuum, professional and community agendas may be complementary. Similarly,

professional agendas may present a response to community concerns or vice versa.

Importantly, therefore, agendas coming from one end of the continuum or the other

must not be thought of in simple binary terms – ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘including or

excluding’. In some instances, professionals may be better able to determine (and act)

on a feasible agenda, and, in others, this may be true of community groups.

In moving towards the centre of the continuum, the position anticipated is one

where professionals work increasingly closely with communities to develop agendas for

action and vice versa. Agendas located at the centre would be jointly developed and

shared by professionals and community members, a position which Baum (2002, 27)

characterises as one of ‘mutualism’, where ‘parties find new shared interests and

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collaborate to serve them’. He distinguishes this from a position of ‘exchange’ where

‘each party gives the other something that serves its interest’, and so would be located

clearly towards one or other end of the continuum.

(2) Social stance

This dimension is about how disadvantage is understood and responded to, and the

ultimate purpose of any actions being taken. At one end of the continuum are what, for

the purposes of this framework, are termed ‘broadly conservative responses’ – meaning

those which are content to operate within existing societal arrangements, for instance,

by offering ‘compensatory education’ which, rather than addressing the underlying

causes of disadvantage, seeks to ‘compensate’ children for ‘deficits’ arising from their

family and community circumstances, typically by providing additional education

interventions. Moving down the continuum, responses may be more progressive in

seeking to involve schools in ameliorating some of the barriers to learning which arise

from living in disadvantaged communities – for example, ill-health and poor housing.

At the other pole, actions are concerned with transforming wider societal arrangements,

the argument being that schools alone cannot overcome the disadvantages experienced

by communities in any fundamental way, and that nothing short of wider societal

transformation is required (Lipman 2011).

Again, while these are presented as opposing stances along a continuum, the

situation is, of course, more nuanced. Indeed, there are authors (see, for instance, Anyon

[2005]) who argue that tackling community disadvantage requires a range of actions

across this continuum; schools need to offer high quality teaching and learning, and to

ameliorate barriers to learning in the community, and to act to challenge wider societal

arrangements, for instance, by lobbying government.

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In trying to capture the nature of responses to disadvantage, the ‘social stance’

dimension can also be used to raise wider questions about the purposes of education.

For example, actions which seek to link education and economic development may see

the primary function of education as developing human capital. Others setting out to

develop social capital and community-responsive curricula and pedagogy may be more

concerned with the cultural validation of disadvantaged communities. Others again may

see education more explicitly as a process of ‘conscientization’ (Freire 1970) with the

explicit goal of enabling disadvantaged communities to develop a critical awareness of

their social circumstances and to act on this. Each purpose has implications too in terms

of the power and control dimensions, giving varying recognition to community

perspectives for example.

Taken together, these two dimensions – of power and control, and social stance

– offer a powerful means of mapping the field of school-community relations in general

terms, with it being possible to locate contributions in terms of where they sit along

these axes. For instance, the literature on ‘extended’, ‘full service’ and ‘community’

schools is typically concerned with agendas that are set exogenously by professionals,

and evaluates support to ‘vulnerable’ students and families without challenging deeper

inequalities.

It is also important to recognise that different ways of conceptualising school-

community relations may extend beyond simple positions to cover areas of the

quadrants in Figure 1, demonstrating the importance of thinking about the poles of each

dimension as representing ‘pulls’ rather than fixed points. This means that any set of

interactions between schools and communities need to be considered as a tendency in a

particular direction rather than as a clearly fixed position. Community organising

provides a good illustration of this. Its basic nature means that it is always towards the

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‘grass roots’ endogenous-end of the power and control dimension, but may ‘seep’

towards exogenous and professional agendas where there is a high level of professional

support for organising. Organising may be concerned with a conservative, single-issue

agenda, for instance, improving the safety of a road crossing outside a school, without

any broader social change agenda. But there is also a growing literature which sees

community organising as part of a process of politicisation aimed at bringing about

fundamental social change (Mediratta 2007). Community groups can also position

themselves differently in relation to the power and control dimension. For instance,

Warren (2005) identifies two traditions in organising. One he terms an ‘outside’

strategy, where groups leverage power unilaterally in the political arena to force

institutions to improve. The other he terms ‘relational’, where community groups

approach schools as partners, with the intention of developing collective action.

Locating the literature

As literature is located on the framework, systematic biases are revealed in the

understandings of school-community relations presented. Overwhelmingly, the field is

shown to be dominated by texts which take for granted the leading role of professionals,

focus on exogenous concerns and pursue socially conservative purposes, thus locating

the bulk of the literature in the top left hand quadrant of Figure 1. In part, this weighting

is likely to reflect the comparative ease that academic researchers have in gaining access

to professionals compared to community members, who they may find ‘hard-to-reach’

(i.e. difficult to identify, contact, and involve actively in research). It is also likely to

reflect the opportunities (and policy and funding imperatives) to shape local service

provision, and the frequent need to achieve demonstrable impacts, which both

determine professionals’ roles and lead research programmes to be aligned with these.

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A consequence of this is that even if critiquing professionals’ actions or studying

mechanisms for community involvement such as school governing bodies, much of the

literature in the field focuses on how professionals might act more effectively. This

(often tacit) acceptance of professional agendas means that the literature has also had a

tendency to accept that schools ‘do to’ communities, casting communities in the largely

passive role of responding to school-initiated interventions. This leads Keith (1999), for

example, to caution against promoting a culture of ‘client dependency’ in

conceptualising full-service, extended, and community schools as the providers of

welfare services.

This sense of professionals ‘doing to’ communities also appears characteristic of

the far fewer reports of schools and professionals acting with more transformative

intents (as located towards or within the bottom left hand quadrant of Figure 1). For

example, Mitra et al. (2008) report on a professionally-driven economic regeneration

strategy which aimed to improve opportunities and outcomes for the community of

‘Milltown’, a town experiencing stark post-industrial decline. As part of this strategy, a

human capital model of education was being pursued, with new curricula and learning

pathways being created to match projected business growth sectors in the town. This

professional vision for the community was, however, reported to contrast starkly with

that of residents, who tended to identify strongly with the town’s recent industrial past,

and the culture, values, and sense of place embedded in this. Professionals, in turn, were

reported as believing they had to act for the community because residents did not

understand the town’s situation.

Moving to the endogenous side of the power and control dimension, there are far

fewer studies which can be located in this part of the map. Those which are tend to

represent instances in which researchers have sought to foreground the voices of

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community members. Again, much of the activity reported in the scholarly literature can

be considered of a broadly socially conservative nature. There are, for instance,

examples of parents developing and running in-school programmes to support students’

learning (see for example Whalen [2007]). On the one hand, such reports do offer an

important critique of professional deficit-driven conceptualisations of community, by

presenting the community effectively as an asset for the school. But on the other, it can

also be argued that such actions will inevitably remain conservative. Nakagawa (2003),

for instance, makes the case that whatever the accompanying rhetoric around

community empowerment and democratic involvement, such activities place parents in

a position to support schools’ and professionals’ agendas, without also giving them the

opportunity to shape those agendas from a community standpoint.

Set against this, there are a small number of accounts of instances where schools

have sought to validate and build on community perspectives. Literature from the USA,

for instance, includes accounts by professional African-American educators working in

poor African-American communities, where school-community relations have been

based on the cultural validation of endogenous perspectives. Savage (1999, cited

Crowson and Boyd 2001, 19), for example, reports ‘high expectations and a strict moral

code passed from residents to teachers and back again’ to be characteristic of this,

alongside a shared value placed on African-American history, music and art. Even so,

these accounts may again be located towards the conservative end of the social stance

dimension, in that they tend to concentrate on strengthening school-community relations

specifically within the community, while doing less to foster a critical awareness of the

community’s disadvantaged position. Put simply, the purpose of action appears not to

be to change the status of the community itself by tackling wider inequalities, but to

create a mutually supportive environment within the community.

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Following this argument, it is also the case that community-initiated actions

which can appear quite radical within a given community – for instance, a successful

campaign to establish a new school – may nonetheless have little transformative impact.

For example, in itself, opening a new school does not positively change the nature of the

local community, and indeed may exacerbate inequalities – a point elaborated below

also in relation to new housing developments.

Moving towards the transformative end of the social stance dimension (bottom

right quadrant of Figure 1), what little literature there is in this part of the map tends to

use community interests to question how far actions with broadly transformative intents

can actually be transformative for local people. Literature on housing and schooling, for

instance, typically challenges the assumption that creating mixed income communities

will be beneficial – or indeed, transformative – for disadvantaged communities. For

example, writing about areas with high concentrations of social housing in England,

Gordon (2008, 190-191) draws attention to the policy tensions associated with efforts to

create new mixed-income communities, asking whether ‘schools [can] continue to meet

the needs of existing families while also responding to the demands of newly attracted

higher income families?’

This point is also addressed in literature from the USA, both in relation to

community organising (Anyon 2005, Lipman 2008) and Charter schools (Fabricant and

Fine 2012). Anyon and Lipman, for instance, both present cases where improvements in

local schools and housing stock, stemming from community organising, have

subsequently led to community members being ‘driven out’ of the area by market

mechanisms. As Anyon (2005, 23) reflects:

Education organizing by itself can improve schools in low income areas to the point

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that housing values rise, businesses increasingly invest in the neighborhood, and low

income residents are pushed out by higher rents… Gentrification resulting from

education organizing… is a reminder that without other public policy changes (in this

case access to employment and affordable housing)… successful school reform in low-

income urban neighborhoods can have unfortunate, unintended consequences for

residents.

This also demonstrates that what appear as minority views, located in under-populated

positions within a wider map of the literature, can nonetheless be used to present

powerful critiques of dominant policy discourses –in this case, about the transformative

potential of infrastructural change.

Concluding comments

This paper has developed a conceptual map of the field of school-community relations.

The map synthesises a diverse and fragmented body of literature, and enables the

understandings embedded in this to be brought to the surface and critiqued. In doing so,

it identifies the range of forms that school-community relations might take, reveals

current gaps and biases, and points to areas where further research is needed to advance

the field.

There is, for example, a case for further research to populate those areas of the

map where there is little scholarly literature available. As this review has revealed, there

has been very little educational research which has sought to develop in-depth

understandings of how disadvantage is experienced by community members and the

roles they think schools should play in responding to this, or the purposes which

community members might ascribe to their participation in schools. Developing such

in-depth understandings also appears central to ensuring that within the research

literature, communities are not simply treated as homogenous entities. Relating to this,

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there is a dearth of literature exploring mechanisms by which power might be

(re)distributed to support the co-production of school-community agendas. The

development of such knowledge bases would mark an important advance in the field.

The map also raises a number of issues about what strengthening school-

community relations might realistically achieve. For instance, the relative

concentrations of literature in Figure 1 suggest that the development of school-

community relations is likely to focus overwhelmingly on the pursuit of broadly

conservative agendas, and further research could help to determine the extent to which

this is an inherent feature of the field. It may be, for instance, much more a product of

the geographically-situated local nature of schools and communities – meaning that

their primary influence is in the neighbourhood contexts where they are embedded –

rather than any lack of transformative ambition. Although the literature has very little to

say on the matter, it does point to the sheer complexity of pursuing transformative

agendas through the strengthening of school-community relations. For instance, as

Keyes and Gregg (2001) explain, because locales are influenced by the wider context, it

is necessary for those involved in developing school-community relations to work with

economic, governmental and educational entities that are beyond the boundaries of

particular locales, but which shape the opportunities in those locales.

As this indicates, it seems unlikely that school-community partnerships would

be able to pursue transformative agendas without support from policy makers to help

align local, regional and national actions as needed. Currently, there is almost nothing in

the literature which considers what such alignments, spanning from schools and

communities, across multiple spatial scales and organisations, might look like or how

they could be achieved. While this opens up potentially rich possibilities for

development and research, the complexities involved could easily be overwhelming.

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More pragmatically, if, as the map of the literature suggests, it is accepted that

efforts to strengthen school-community relations may be most likely to result in small-

scale, broadly conservative, ameliorative actions, the most productive avenues for future

research and development may lie in exploring how the possibilities for such actions

can be strengthened and placed on new relational footings. For instance, the analysis

developed by mapping the literature suggests that agendas for action tend to be driven

by professionals, and less often by community groups, but only very rarely are they

characterised by Baum’s notion of ‘mutualism’. There is, moreover, very little in the

literature to suggest how professional-community divides might begin to be bridged,

even though, as Crowson and Boyd (1999) suggest, this is likely to be central to

addressing fundamental questions about the roles schools and communities working

together might play in addressing neighbourhood disadvantage. As they reflect:

In the final analysis, the issue seems to come down to a question of how to meld

together aspects of two competing strategies – professional coordinated services, and

community development or empowerment – into workable approaches for schools in

partnership with parents, community organizations, and other agencies. Each approach

in isolation from the other appears likely to produce only limited success. Yet merging

the two approaches presents daunting problems. Community empowerment approaches

are inclined to become highly politicized and conflict strongly with bureaucratic norms

and procedures. Professional service approaches are inclined to be disconnected from,

and sometimes disrespectful of, parental and community preferences and values…

(Crowson and Boyd 1999, 19-20)

In the short- to medium-term at least, it may be that research which can help to populate

this middle ground, and explore how professional and community perspectives might

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best be brought together, will have most to offer efforts strengthen school-community

relations and promote the well-being of disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

of 36

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Exogenous agendas

Working within existing societal arrangements

Transforming existing societal arrangements

Endogenous agendas

Social stance dimension

Power and control dimension

Figure 1. A framework for analysing the literature

(Dyson, Gallannaugh and Kerr n.d., 6)

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