ABSTRACT
School leaders are increasingly called upon to pursue meaningful partnerships with families and community groups, yet many leaders are unprepared to meet the challenges of partnerships, to cross cultural boundaries, or to be accountable to the community. Alliances are needed among educators, families, and community groups that value relationship building, dialogue, and power-sharing as part of socially just, democratic schools. This book brings together research perspectives that intersect the fields of leadership and partnerships to inform and inspire more authentic collaboration.
Contributors from the fields of educational leadership, family engagement, school-community partnerships, and education for social justice come together to examine the role of educational leaders in promoting partnerships as a dimension of leadership for social justice. The volume offers a mix of empirical, conceptual, and reflective chapters with research representing qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches in urban, suburban, and rural schools. The chapter, "Conversations with Community-Oriented Leaders," includes candid advice from district and school-level administrators on this under-documented aspect of leadership. Situating leadership for partnerships within the leadership literature, this book proposes a model for addressing tensions embedded in home-school relations and leading schools toward more authentic relationships with stakeholders. This collection of original scholarly articles will be a unique resource for new and aspiring administrators and for researchers in both the fields of leadership and school-family-community partnerships.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |51 pages
Leadership for Partnerships
chapter |19 pages
Edging In
chapter |23 pages
Conceptualizing Leadership for Authentic Partnerships
part |62 pages
Leading Partnerships across Difference
chapter |23 pages
Enlisting Collective Help
chapter |20 pages
Advocacy-Based Partnerships, Special Education, and African American Families
chapter |17 pages
Authentic Engagement with Bicultural Parents and Communities
part |78 pages
Leading Partnerships through Policy and Program Development
chapter |16 pages
Policy Aspirations and Dilemmas of Implementation
chapter |18 pages
Creating Organizational Cultures of Family and Community Engagement
chapter |22 pages
Parents as Action Learners and Leaders
chapter |20 pages
Supporting Teacher Leadership for Partnerships
part |60 pages
New Contexts and Challenges in Leadership for Partnerships