Reviewing the field of school-community relations:
Conceptualisations in the literature on schoolcommunity relations in disadvantaged areas
Alan Dyson & Kirstin Kerr, University of Manchester, UK
Contact d.a.dyson@manchester.uk or Kirstin.Kerr@manchester.ac.uk
Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting,
Vancouver, 13 April 2013
Abstract
There is a considerably body of scholarly literature which explores
relationships between schools and geographically-sited disadvantaged
communities. This typically assumes that the development of closer schoolcommunity relations can promote the resilience, well-being and sustainability
of these communities. However, the field is also conceptually complex,
embodying widely different assumptions about the nature of disadvantage, the
role of schools in overcoming disadvantage, and of how power should be
distributed within school-community relations. This paper’s purpose is to
surface the understandings and sets of assumptions embedded in the research
literature and to make these subject to scrutiny. It reports the outcomes of a
process of conceptual synthesis used to develop a map of the field. A mapping
framework, which is intended as a heuristic tool for navigating and critiquing
the literature, is presented. This framework is then populated with reference to
the existing literature. Through this process, systematic biases are revealed,
and the implications of these for research and policy are considered.
1. Introduction
There is a considerably body of scholarly literature which explores connections
between schools and communities. Much of this is concerned with the role of schools
in relation to geographically-located communities which experience economic and
other associated forms of disadvantage. In this subset of the literature, ‘community’ is
typically used 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 area 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. It is with exploring these possibilities, rather than mounting a
spatial critique, that this paper is concerned.
The literature in this field is also dominated by descriptive, and sometimes evaluative,
accounts of activities linking schools and disadvantaged communities. This does
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much to disguise the field’s conceptual complexity, as the sets of assumptions about
school-community relations that underpin the research literature remain tacitly
embedded, rather than being surfaced and made subject to scrutiny. Thus, while there
is a general consensus that developing school-community relations is desirable, the
more contentious issues of precisely what they should be seeking to achieve, how, and
whose values they should promote, are far less frequently discussed. Engaging with
these questions, raises fundamental issues about the purposes of schooling; the nature
of disadvantage, its impacts on schooling and how these should be addressed; and of
how power should be distributed within school-community relations.
In order to surface these issues and bring some much needed clarity to this situation,
this paper develops a conceptual map of the different ways in which schoolcommunity relations in disadvantaged areas have been understood in the literature.
This map is intended as a heuristic tool which can help readers to navigate and engage
in conceptual critique of the field. It draws attention to: (i) the sorts of actions which
have purposefully been taken to link schools and disadvantaged geographical
communities, and in doing so, tackle disadvantage at a community-level; and (ii) what
the literature says about the understandings embedded in these actions – both about
the purposes of the actions being taken, and who has the power to act. The scope of
the paper is international, and draws most heavily on literature from England and the
U.S.A., and also from Australia, reflecting their relative prominence in the field.
The paper is structured as follows. A brief introduction to the literature on schoolcommunity relations in disadvantaged geographical communities is provided,
demonstrating its diverse nature and the need for a conceptual map of the field. The
processes of conceptual synthesis, used to review the existing literature, are then
outlined. Following this, the mapping framework developed through this review
process is presented and populated using the literature. The concluding section
considers the implications of the conceptual map developed for research and policy.
2. School-community relations in disadvantaged areas: 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 contexts of major cities and de-industrialised towns. Recent years have seen
considerable international interest in finding ways to break these patterns. For
example, in England, New Labour governments promised that no-one should be
“seriously disadvantaged by where they live” (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001:5), with
this leading to a decade of concerted efforts to understand how the deprivation and
associated disadvantages experienced by people living in particular places, might be
overcome. More recently and echoing this same sentiment, in his 2007 election
campaign, President Obama pledged to ‘change the odds for urban America’, arguing:
If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of
unemployment and violence; failing schools and broken homes, then we can't
just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire
community.(18.07.07)
Schools have also been suggested to have distinct roles to play in ‘healing’
disadvantaged communities, 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
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wider social, economic and political contexts. This dual nature has also been reflected
internationally, where, 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 (as seen for example in the National
Strategies in England, and No Child Left Behind reforms in the U.S.A.). On the other
hand, attempts have also 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.
Important as these policy approaches have been, it is arguable, however, that they
have been based on distinctly impoverished notions of the dynamics of geographical
communities (and particularly those experiencing deprivation), and of the actual and
potential interactions between schools and the communities they serve (see, for
instance, Lupton, 2010). Put simply, to date, 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).
However, it is also clear that no matter how impoverished conceptualisations of
community-school interaction 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 community
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 imbalance.
Recent years have also seen a growing interest in ‘asset-based’ approaches as to how
public services can support community development (see, for instance, Foot &
Hopkins, 2010, Glickman & Scally, 2008, Shirley, 2001). In the United States 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 & Hong, 2009, Warren et
al., 2009). There is also evidence that schools can function as places where
community identities (and particularly those of marginalised communities) can be
affirmed and communities empowered through this (Morris, 2004, Richardson, 2009).
As this demonstrates, to date, a wide range of contrasting understandings have been
embedded in efforts to use schools to address community 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 and 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 rarely made explicit. The purpose of this paper, in
developing a conceptual map of the field, is therefore to make the understandings
embedded in the research literature open to scrutiny.
In order to achieve this, it is necessary to surface the sets of understandings and
assumptions which underpin the knowledge of school-community relations produced
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by research. Researchers have occasionally sought to achieve this in relation to
specific concerns, as, for instance, in Schutz’s critique of traditional
conceptualisations of community engagement (Schutz, 2006), or in Morris’ critique of
deficit perspectives on schools serving African-American communities (Morris,
2004). However, it is important to go beyond these isolated critiques of particular
positions to create a critical overview of the field – a task to which this paper now
turns.
3. Methods
To create a conceptual map of the research literature on school-community relations
in disadvantaged areas, a process of ‘conceptual synthesis’ (Nutley et al. 2002a) has
been undertaken. The aim of this is ‘not to provide an exhaustive search and review of
all the literature published in a filed [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 search procedures
guided by the need to identify different kinds of conceptualization; and synthesise the
literature by grouping it into families characterized by the use of similar conceptual
frameworks.
In practice, the review process began with the authors of this paper, in the role of
reviewers, identifying known key texts in the field which embody different
conceptualizations. They then compared other texts with these starting points to
consider whether they embodied similar or different conceptualizations. Throughout
the review process, texts were read by multiple reviewers, who compared their
interpretations of the conceptualizations embodied in the text, and together, sought to
articulate the actual and potential relationships between different conceptualizations.
Two external advisory groups were also established – one a cross-disciplinary
academic group drawn from UK universities, and the other a group of academic
education experts from different national contexts. Their roles were to identify
relevant literatures and to contest and elaborate the reviewers’ emerging
interpretations.
In searching the literature, a string of search terms was 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 (predominantly from the UK, USA and Australia) from 1990 – though where
key texts predating this were known or widely referred to, these were also included.
Following these initial searches, the reviewers focused specifically on literature
detailing where actions were proposed, or had been undertaken, to engage schools and
communities with the deliberate intention of impacting on experiences of
disadvantage at a community-level. This means that the reviewers excluded literature
on, for instance: disadvantaged communities’ attitudes to education; single-issue
initiatives focusing on particular groups of students, (for example, an initiative to
support teenage mothers in school); or internal school improvement measures. Further
literature searches combining ‘school’ and a search term indicating action for specific
purposes, (‘regeneration’, ‘renewal’, ‘community development’, ‘community
organising’), were also conducted. The review process stopped when further literature
searches failed to add to the conceptual map developed.
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4. Developing a mapping framework
As stated earlier, in mapping the literature, the intention has been to create a heuristic
tool which can help readers to navigate and engage in conceptual critique of the field.
For such a map to be successful there must be an underpinning framework which
enables the understandings surfaced in the literature to be located and understood in
relation to one another. To achieve this, and provide a set of common reference
points, the framework must inevitably present a simplified account of highly complex
ideas. However, rather than being a weakness, this is precisely what makes the
framework fit for purpose.
The mapping framework presented here has two component parts. The first identifies
the broad types of substantive approach or actions taken to link schools and
geographically-located disadvantaged communities. The second presents 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?
The reason for this division, between types of action and their social purposes, is to
acknowledge that broad forms of action can be conceptualised in different ways. For
instance, community members’ involvement in school governance has been reported
variously as subjugating community interests to those of professionals (Ranson and
Crouch, 2009); empowering communities and strengthening 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.
4.1 Actions developing school-community relations in
disadvantaged areas
In reviewing the literature, eight broad types of action have been identified. These are
broadly characterized below and are intended as a guide to the literature. It is
important to be clear that while these activities are not mutually exclusive – nor
indeed, exclusive to disadvantaged contexts – they have nonetheless been reported as
distinct mechanisms for linking schools and disadvantaged geographically-located
communities.
i. 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
geographically-located disadvantage 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 and
technology facilities. Such schools are frequently termed ‘full-service’, ‘extended’ or
‘community’ schools (Cummings et al., 2011). Miron (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.
ii. Schools developing communities’ social and civic capacity
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There is a smaller body of literature focusing on schools’ activities which explicitly
aim to build positive relationships, social networks and a sense of cohesion and pride
within communities. These may concentrate on the building of 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 conceptualization of the relationship
between schools and communities, with schools also seeking to support students’
wider relationships in alternative community settings, with families, friends,
neighbours, churches, youth associations (Timpane and Reich, 1997).
The development of social capital is also presented as a starting point for developing
civic capacity – namely relationships between community institutions. 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 schools 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)
iii. Schools supporting the development of community infrastructures
There is a small but distinctive strand in the literature which suggests that schools can
play an integral role in the development of community infrastructures, in particular,
relating to economic and housing development. Taking these in turn, the literature on
economic development views economic rather social factors as being at the root of
problems in poor neighbourhoods, and the amelioration of social problems as
therefore dependent on economic development. As such, 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 et al. 2001, Mitra et al. 2008); and contributing to the
local economy when purchasing goods and services locally, and employing local
people (Kretzman 1992).
Literature on housing and schooling is typically more clearly concerned with
influencing more general community conditions, and in particular local
demographics, in order to influence social and economic development. For example,
writing in a U.S. context, Chung (2002) argues that the development of affordable
housing can be co-ordinated with the development of 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.
iv. 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 are reported to integrate this history, experience and range of opportunities
into their curricula and pedagogical approaches, with this validating local culture
(Gonzalez and Moll 2002).
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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 enable students marginalised
by disadvantage to struggle against oppression.
v. Community members involvement in school governance
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 about the formal mechanisms through which community members can
hold schools to account. Within this, there are few papers 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 what they term 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’ (Sheard and
Avis, 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.
vi. Community organising
There is a small but very specific body of literature, almost exclusive to the U.S.A, on
community organising. This is a mechanism, often led by trade unions and
professional advocacy organisations, to mobilise the interests and power of
community 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’
(Schutz 2006: 719). Similarly, Shirley (1996, 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.
vii Parental choice
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There is a literature around the marketisation of education and the role that parental
choice plays in this. Two broad assumptions underpin this. The first, as Ransom
(2008) 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 of improved attainment (Anderson 1998). These mechanisms are
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.
viii 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 US (see, for
instance, Allen 2010) where Charter Schools have been established in disadvantaged
communities, often with the support of trade unions, businesses or other external
organisations. Such schools are typically presented as community-oriented, and as
having 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
model is presented as suggesting a more direct role for schools as agents for
community development.
4.2 Purpose and social stance
Having set out the range of actions 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. A framework for analysing the literature [approximately here]
Social stance dimension
Working within existing societal arrangements
Exogenous agendas
Endogenous agendas
Power and control dimension
Transforming existing societal arrangements
For clarity, this framework takes the form of a set of intersecting dimensions against
which literature can be situated. The first dimension is ‘power and control’. This is
used to explore whose interests the literature reports as driving efforts to link schools
and communities. The second dimension is ‘social stance’. This explores the purposes
literature attributes to actions linking schools and communities. These are elaborated
below.
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i.
Power and control
This dimension invites questions about: Who sets the agenda for efforts to link
schools and communities? 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 from within communities which reflect 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 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.
ii.
Social stance
This dimension is about how disadvantage is understood and responded to. At one
end of the continuum are broadly conservative responses – i.e. those which are
content to operate within existing societal arrangements by ‘improving’ schools,
or offering ‘compensatory education’ or additional services or resources. 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 – e.g. 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 disadvantage experienced
by communities in any fundamental way.
Again, while these are presented as opposing stances along a continuum, the
situation is 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 dimension of
‘social stance’ 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 concerned with developing social capital and communityresponsive 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, 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 typically concerns itself 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 schoolcommunity 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. What this means is
that any set of interactions between schools and communities needs 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 ‘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.
5. Locating the literature
As literature is located on the framework presented above, systematic biases are
revealed in the knowledge of school-community relations produced by researchers.
Overwhelmingly, the field is shown to be dominated by reports 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 researchers have in gaining access to professionals compared to community
members. It is also likely to reflect the opportunities (and policy and funding
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imperatives) to shape local service provision, and the frequent need to achieve
demonstrable impacts, which shape professionals’ roles and lead research
programmes to be aligned with these.
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
conceptualizing 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 rust belt community of
‘Milltown’. 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 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, notably, 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
community members. There is almost nothing within the research literature written by
community members themselves – though given the need to conform to academic
conventions, this is unsurprising.
Again, on this side of the map, much of what the research presents 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 2005). 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 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 where schools have sought to
validate and build on community perspectives. The U.S. literature, for instance,
includes accounts by black educators working in poor black communities, where
school-community relations have been based on the cultural validation of endogenous
perspectives. Savage (1999), for instance, reports ‘high expectations and a strict moral
code passed from residents to teachers and back again’ to be characteristic of this,
11
alongside a shared value placed on black history, music and art. Even so, these
accounts can 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 is not to change the status of the community itself by tackling wider
inequalities, but to create a mutually supportive environment within the community.
Following this argument, it also the case that community-initiated actions which can
appear quite radical within a given community – for example, a successful campaign
to establish a new school with the aim of ensuring access to high quality education –
may have little transformative impact. The research evidence on charter schools can
be considered illuminative in this respect; as Di Carlo (2011) notes in his recent metaanalysis of charter schools’ impacts, these have been negligible because ‘charters
confront the same challenges as traditional district schools in meeting students’
diverse needs and boosting performance’ (www.washingtonpost.com/blogs).
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) 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?’ (p190-191).
This point is also addressed in the U.S. literature, specifically in relation to
community organising. Anyon (2005) and Lipman (2008) 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 reflects:
Education organizing by itself can improve schools in low income areas to the
point that housing values rise, businesses increasingly invest in the
neighborhood, and low income residents are pushed put 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.
(2005: 23)
What this also demonstrates is that what appear as minority views, located in underpopulated positions within a wider map of the literature, can nonetheless be used to
present powerful critiques of dominant policy discourses – and in this case, about the
transformative potential of infrastructural change.
6. Implications for policy and research
This paper has developed a conceptual map of the scholarly literature on schoolcommunity relations in disadvantaged areas. It has presented a framework for
mapping the literature developed through a process of conceptual synthesis, and
12
located the literature accordingly. The outcomes of this process point to a number of
issues which research and policy will need to address in future.
A first issue is that research is needed to populate those areas of the framework where
there is little literature available. For example, very little educational research has
sought to develop in-depth understandings of how disadvantage is experienced by
community members and the role they think schools should play in responding to this.
Developing such in-depth understandings also appears central to ensuring that
communities are not simply treated in the research literature as homogenous entities.
Research will also need to develop a deeper awareness of how local actors use their
power (for instance, to include or exclude certain groups, or to dominate or work with
others) and to understand how multiple agendas and actions play out simultaneously
in local areas.
A second issue is about the spheres of influence that community members and
professionals can most readily and directly act within. In this respect, the relative
concentrations of literature reporting different actions on the framework in Figure 1 is
also a reflection of who is best placed to achieve particular outcomes – and which
outcomes are most achievable. For instance, the conceptual map of the field indicates
that professionals working within existing arrangements appear best placed to have
impacts on communities’ experiences of disadvantage in terms of tangible,
measurable outcomes relating to service provision. Community members, even if
motivated to campaign for service reforms, still need professionals to act on their
interests if they are to influence service provision.
Strongly connected to this are a third set of issues which are about the purposes of
action related to the spatial scale(s) at which action is taken. The geographicallysituated local nature of schools and communities means that their primary influence is
in the neighbourhood contexts where they are embedded. Even if their actions are
intended to be transformative, it is extremely difficult for them to influence the wider
societal structures needed to bring about fundamental change in their local contexts.
The fact is that the more transformative the agenda being pursued, the wider the range
of issues which have to be addressed, and the greater the range of spatial levels at
which coordinated action has to be taken. As Keyes and Gregg (2001) note:
because locales are influenced by the wider context it is necessary for those
involved in developing school-community interactions to work with economic
and governmental and educational entities that are beyond the boundaries of
particular locales but which shape the opportunities in those locales.
Following this, Anyon (2005), for example, argues that to be transformative, the
development of school-community relations in disadvantaged areas would have to be
part of a nested and holistic strategy to tackle urban disadvantage – encompassing
health, housing, employment, education, and bringing about complementary changes
in local, regional, national, and global contexts. The map of the literature reveals very
little which explores what such an alignment over multiple scales would look like, or
how it could be achieved. Arguably, the closest thing to this which has been identified
is where schools or local school systems have deliberately been oriented to support
economic regeneration. However, such efforts remain far from Anyon’s all
encompassing vision, and even at a local level, have a tendency to ‘do to’
communities.
13
Leading from these issues, there are also specific implications for policy. If the local
nature of schools and communities is acknowledged, it follows that moves to develop
school-community relations are likely to promote action at this level. This, in turn, is
likely to reinforce a focus on ameliorative actions within local arrangements – this
being the locus where schools and communities are best able to exercise their
influence. Policy makers must be therefore be cautious about anticipating
transformative outcomes which local actions in themselves cannot realistically
achieve, and must acknowledge that transformative agendas will require some
alignment of local, regional and national activity to this end.
The possibilities for developing school-community relations in order to ameliorate the
impacts of disadvantage, can, however, be strengthened. The map of the literature
suggests that there is a need for greater dialogue between professionals and
communities, leading, at least, to shared agendas, for there is little that currently
bridges this divide. The importance of addressing this gap is indicated by Crowson
and Boyd (1999) who 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…
In the short- to medium-term, research which can help populate this middle ground,
and establish the best mechanisms for bringing professional and community
perspectives together, may have most to offer policy makers keen to use schoolcommunity relations to promote the well-being of disadvantaged areas.
14
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