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,
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).
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Structured abstract:482
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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.
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.
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 relationsare 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 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, thispaper 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 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).
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 Hopkins2010; Glickman and Scally2008; Shirley2001). 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 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 positionsto 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 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 outlinedearlier). They then comparedother 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 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 thatthe 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.
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 arealso 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 fieldto be successful, there needs to be an underpinning framework which can allowthe 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 about the understandings embedded in these actions. To do this, it employs an analytical framework which poses two broad questions of the literature, namely: