Reframing Community Partnerships in Education

Uniting the Power of Place and Wisdom of People

Miguel A. Guajardo, Francisco Guajardo, Christopher Janson, Matthew Militello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317555599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Reframing Community Partnerships in Education provides both the theoretical framework as well as a practical guide to engage educators in interdisciplinary, inter-organizational, multicultural, and multi-generational work to improve the social fabric of communities. Using case examples of best practice, this book explores transformational practices for community development, community building, and civic engagement. Featuring "Community Learning Exchange" pedagogies adaptable to a wide range of contexts, this book encourages educators—through use of participatory practices and a collective leadership model—to build stronger communities and advance learning for all.

Part I

The Ideas Behind the Action

Drawing 1 Artwork by Mónica Valadez.

Source: Mónica Valadez. Used with permission.

1

The Community Learning Exchange

This book is about a process and a way of life that celebrate the power of place and the wisdom of people. A Community Learning Exchange (CLE) provides an opportunity for diverse community members—leaders, activists, educators, youth, elders—to come together for a period of engaged, deep learning. Together in relationship, these community members openly examine their common challenges, collective gifts, and then freely exchange successful approaches and tools that can drive changes within themselves, their organizations (including schools), and their communities. CLEs break the isolation people working toward organizational and community change often feel by encouraging the deepening of their relationships with others. CLEs provide time and space for everyday people to come together and join in deep and purposeful conversations that are very difficult to have within the blur of our hectic daily schedules and lives. During CLEs, participants work to establish conditions of safety and trust so that they can openly share their gifts with others so that together they can challenge themselves, their organizations, and their communities in order to better meet their individual and collective needs while supporting the development, growth, and happiness of others in equitable and just ways.

This book is born out of the gifts and strengths we have seen in communities. It is nurtured by the need to reframe school and community partnerships. We can see inefficiencies in our bureaucracies, inequities in our communities, and injustices in our organizations and institutions. But how can we change them? How do we go about transforming those very things that mediate individuals and society so that we can make life healthier and more fulfilling for ourselves and for others. Some of us want to help reform schools that do not seem to be effectively nurturing our sons’ and daughters’ growth and development. Others are looking to make our neighborhoods safer. Still others recognize the challenges newcomers face in our cities. We believe that the Community Learning Exchange and its foundational axioms provide a tried, tested, and true pathway to those changes and transformations. Specifically, individual, collective, and community changes occur through Community Learning Exchanges built from the axioms that (a) learning and leadership are a dynamic social process, (b) conversations are critical and central pedagogies, (c) the people closest to the issues are best situated to discover answers to local questions and problems, (d) crossing boundaries enriches how we develop and learn, and (e) hope and change are built on assets and dreams of locals and their communities.

We also know that organizational and community changes are complex processes and that complexity requires that we seek to understand them in intentional ways. Organizations and communities contain an ever-changing array of people with diverse needs and concerns, and assets and gifts. These complex dynamics require that we are purposeful in our efforts to understand them. Over time and across settings and communities, the Community Learning Exchange has produced and informed a theory for how those changes occur, and thus how they can be nurtured and directed. If the five axioms of the Community Learning Exchange provide postulates that enrich and deepen meaning with each application, the Community Learning Exchange theory of change provides a template or a lens through which we both examine and enact changes in our organizations and communities. Specifically, the CLE theory of change invites us to look at our families, our neighborhoods, our communities, and our organizations with an eye for relationships, assets, stories, place, politic, and action (RASPPA). Importantly, the RASPPA theory of change creates the cognitive, affective, and relational space in which CLE participants can begin to come together and share their collective gifts in order to understand their collective challenges from multiple perspectives, and then to co-construct solutions to those challenges that, when enacted together, can lead to sustained and empowering action and change.

The Work of the Community Learning Exchange

Launched in 2008, this sustained work encourages communities to work across boundaries to cultivate collective leadership and local solutions to issues. Much of this work focuses on engaging the community to improve education as a vital pathway of opportunity and well-being for historically marginalized communities. A key component of this work is the inclusion of local communities sharing their approaches broadly with other organizations and communities. CLEs take place as national gatherings, as well as regional and local learning exchanges.

An early CLE brought 10 communities from states ranging from New York to Hawaii together in south Texas for a 3-day CLE focused on the theme “Collective Leadership and Systems Change: Examining Poverty, Practice, and Policy.” About 70 people from different walks of life participated, including high school students, teachers, and principals; nonprofit workers; university professors; and parents concerned about their children’s education. Two local community-based organizations, the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development and La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), hosted the gathering. Together with the national CLE planning team, the host organizations planned the agenda, organized policy field trips as site visits, and designed a process for engagement that utilized interactive and place-based pedagogies. Local organizers understood the issues best and provided the local stories on how families, communities, and other sectors dealt with poverty; local participants were also interested in learning how other communities addressed similar issues. How and where the communities came together were key questions that informed how the agenda would be shaped and the physical locations where communities would engage in conversations. The issues mattered, the conversations mattered, and the spaces where ideas and conversations were shared mattered, as physical and metaphorical spaces were fundamental considerations to maximize the learning process.

Community in the Community Learning Exchange

In the CLE vernacular, community is a process as much as it is a physical, tangible place. Community is not something that stands alone but is a generative structure informed by a set of ideas, practices, struggles, hopes, and dreams. It is a set of questions that challenges assumptions, principles, and ways of being. Community is where we make meaning, transform meaning, and work together for the common good. It is where people come together with the intent to build, teach, and learn with each other. Community is a state of mind, a metaphorical expression of how people can be together. Pedagogies that are community-centered value people and tend to identify and build the agency they bring with them. One youth from South Texas described community by suggesting, “It’s like primos (cousins) you never met before.” The youth suggested we come from the same ancestors, some with different shades of skin color, some with different accents and languages. “But we’re all the same,” he said, “because we all hurt, we all laugh, and we can all celebrate what we are together.” In the end, he suggested his greatest realization through the CLE experience is that community is about a way of life. It’s about living a life where we invest in our relationships, recognize our gifts, explore our stories, respect our place, and do all this in an ethical manner. This is the meaning of “community” in the Community Learning Exchange.

The community of the CLE emerged from a Kellogg Foundation national leadership initiative called the Kellogg Leadership for Community Change (KLCC). Started in 2002 with the goal of building community leadership in some of the most distressed regions of the country, KLCC intended to use the Foundation’s lessons on building local leadership capacities through a model of collective leadership for community change. The Foundation selected 11 communities for the initiative that spanned between 2002 and 2006. It identified two national organizations, the Center for Ethical Leadership (CEL) from Seattle and the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) from Washington, DC, to coordinate the national work. The national organizations played key roles in facilitating the leadership development through organizing national conferences, facilitating skill-building workshops, and holding the national community together. Both CEL and IEL played critical roles in supporting the Community Learning Exchange.

The expansion of the CLE network has been organic and generative. As the KLCC grant period came to an end, the communities banded together in a new collective iteration known as the Community Learning Exchange. The CLE family expanded from 11 communities to dozens of communities from at least a dozen states. The growth has typically occurred through a generative process where an original community invites a new community to participate in a CLE. Identifying new communities to participate depends on the relationship between the organizing theme for a particular CLE and the nature of leadership for community change in which a prospective community may be engaged. Readiness and vision are key dispositions for invitation. A community must have awareness that it wants to change and there must be a semblance of hope for change. The original communities looked for such qualities as they invited new communities into the process. For example, the original community from South Texas, named the Llano Grande Center, invited another community from Hawaii to participate in the South Texas CLE, because the Hawaiian community was involved in systems change initiatives through a close look at policy and poverty. A new community from California was invited to the South Texas CLE for the same reason, as were communities from the Bronx, New York, rural North Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida. Each of the new communities demonstrated readiness to act and a vision to engage in leadership for the public good.

A close look at Jacksonville provides useful lessons in understanding the spirit and scope of learning exchanges. When a Jacksonville team designed their CLE, they built on several years of planning, organizing, and hosting of local learning exchanges. Through a multi-year process, local students, teachers, workers in the faith community, and others nurtured local interest in this interactive process for teaching and learning. Local CLEs were held in churches, community centers, and local universities, including a public university and a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). A series of community conversations locally identified the salient issues within the local economy and in the community at large, namely the chronic issue of racial strife and opportunities for African American youth in schools. Through deep discussions on the history of race relations in the region and the role of faith-based organizations, local leaders raised local awareness and began to reach out to others across the country to learn how other communities worked to resolve issues of race. Jacksonville leaders generated momentum and sought to host a national learning exchange focused on the theme of moral courage. Through their developmental experience, they realized that social and racial justice work required that participants exercise moral courage. They were ready to talk with both local folks, and with communities from across the country about how to share stories specific to moral courage, and how to move toward a future of hope and opportunity.

The Jacksonville team worked strategically with the national planning team to identify communities from different parts of the country and from northern Florida to participate in the Jacksonville learning exchange. “We’re looking for communities that see themselves as morally courageous. We want them to be talking to each other, to learn from each other,” said a Jacksonville teacher while on a conference call intended to recruit fitting communities. When the communities were identified, each was asked to bring a team from their place; typically, guest communities arrive in teams of four to six. In Jacksonville, like other CLEs, youth were highlighted as team members. In the end, the planning process called for 70 participants recruited from a dozen organizations or communities. Half would be locals, primarily from the Jacksonville area; the other half would come from the continental United States and from Hawaii. Identification of local themes was guided by the question, “Where have we seen moral courage exercised in authentic ways?” Jacksonville organizers subsequently probed the local networks and scanned the regional landscape. The same question guided identification of locations to engage in site visits, an important practice in the evolving CLE pedagogies.

Local organizations came from the state university, the local HBCU, faith-based organizations, social services agencies, and a community development enterprise. All local organizations had been engaged in conversations on issues of race, community, history, and how acts of moral courage have shaped those issues, so they were primed to share and learn. Others traveled long distances. They came from an organization in Seattle that facilitates social, cultural, and historical healing processes and other engagement practices. They came from a school in Central Texas where teachers and school leaders explore the historical roots of inequity in the school and community, and use the findings to shape school curriculum and pedagogies that are culturally relevant and responsible. They came from an organization in Washington, DC, where issues of special needs children across the country are addressed through policy advocacy. They came from Hawaii, where a team works to reverse the colonization forces of Native Hawaiian people through wide-ranging school reform initiatives that place Native Hawaiian culture at the center of teaching and learning. They came from South Texas, where a team of students and faculty members from a regional university work to integrate Mexican American historical and cultural themes into ways of teaching and learning at a school populated by 90% Mexican American students, but with minimal curricular presence of Mexican American themes across the university. All participating communities saw themselves as exercising moral courage as they pursued their social change agendas. Maintaining alignment to the theme, moral courage in the case of the Jacksonville CLE, is an important part of the planning process.

The work of the CLE has engendered a new brand of civic behavior based on trusting relationships, building assets, and creating new stories by focusing on place and inspiring community action. The work has unleashed a new imagination. A youth who attended the CLE in Jacksonville reflected on her newfound imagination when she said,

I’d always thought the answers to fixing our problems needed to come from ideas outside our community. But after this experience, including the weeks before the three days of intense CLE work and the weeks after the actual gathering, I’m beginning to think all the answers are here. We just need to tap our imagination more than we have in the past. I’ve found that my imagination is most active and more creative when I think about all the good people and all the great talent we have in our own community. We have the answers to our problems.

Community Learning Exchanges are about uniting the power of place with the wisdom of people. This can only be done by bringing people together in conversation. During the CLE’s early life, teachers, students, and parents from rural South Texas have come together with educators and parents from the Bronx, New York, to learn about how to build on existing local strengths; teachers and students from the island of Oahu have similarly come together with school leaders and students from Central Texas communities to fortify the institution building and community development work they do at home. Leaders from Jacksonville, Florida, rural northeast North Carolina, Seattle, Buffalo, Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, Washington, DC, rural northwestern Wisconsin, and so many other places have come together to learn from each and to break the isolation of their day-do-day work; they’ve come together to find new solutions that are respectful, that understand the importance of place, that identify and build on local assets, and that weave stronger communities. People from these far-reaching places have built the skills and learned strategies and processes to do such things through their experience in the CLE.

Rhythm of CLE

The origins of the ideas fueling the CLE’s imagination are articulated in its genealogy; the CLE works to unite the power of place with the wisdom of people. When the elements outlined in this text merge, the spirit of the CLE comes alive. In this context, “coming to life” means that deep conversations take place, thoughtful questions guide the inquiry, relationships are developed, our imagination is enlarged, and the curriculum for engagement is dynamic. This section ties the different elements in the book into a logic model based on the rhythm of the CLE, as it deviates from the traditional step-by-step linear “how-to” model. The rhythm between place, people, and topic/theme is aligned by the CLE’s curricular strategies applied by the planning and facilitation team.

In the stories of change and engagement outlined in this book, we see the CLE work in multiple spaces and for varying purposes. The stories can be couched within the ecologies of knowing that are individual, organization, and community, and they highlight varied pedagogical strategies employed in r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I The Ideas Behind the Action
• Part II The Work
• Part III Dynamic-Critical Pedagogies
• Part IV Impacts, Reflections, and an Invitation to Action
• Appendix
• Additional Resources
• About the Authors
• Index