School as Community: From Promise to Practice

Conclusions: What is Leadership For?

Conclusions: What is Leadership For? Gail Furman As discussed in the introduction; this book is about the reemergence of the concept of community in schools. The introduction provided a “map” of the multistranded terrain of this topic, which has been vividly illustrated in the chapters collected here. I now wish to summarize the “lessons” about the practice of school community that emerge from these chapters, giving particular attention to implications for leadership practice. These lessons are, of course, my interpretations; other readers will construct their own meanings from the content of this book. In looking for lessons in this book, it is not my goal to provide tidy analytic conclusions, prescriptive theory, or “models” for constructing community in public schools. Indeed, this would be a naive and suspect goal, because this collection is a limited sample of the multistranded and multidimensional scholarship on community (see the introduction). Thus, while some key pieces of the developing portrait of community in schools may be suggested here, it is not claimed that the picture is complete. Furthermore, in regard to implications for leadership practice, it is clearly beyond the compass of any one leader to “create” community in a school via the unilateral application of specific leadership strategies and skills; these chapters make it abundantly clear that, besides being multidimensional, community is indeed communal, a product of the intentions, interactions, and practices of all participants. What leadereducators can do is help to create and sustain the conditions that nurture community , and that will be the general thrust of implications for leadership practice stated here. One further qualification is that my use of the term leadership practice is not meant to imply that leadership is the exclusive purvey of individuals in administrative roles. Indeed, when community is the focus, “distributed ” (Elmore, 1999), “shared” (Leithwood, Steinbach, & Ryan, 1997; 277 Pounder, Ogawa, & Adams, 1995) and “constructivist” (Lambert et al., 1995) leadership are more appropriate concepts, as will be discussed in more detail in this chapter. With these qualifications in mind, I will summarize a set of lessons about the practice and processes of community that are suggested in each section of the book, and based on these lessons generate a series of implications for leadership theory and practice. LESSONS FOR THE PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY The Conceptual Understanding of Community Section I focused on conceptual and theoretical considerations in regard to school community. In chapter 1 Lynn G. Beck’s analysis of the language or “metaphors” of community used in recent literature uncovered the multidimensional nature of the community concept as well as the underlying “coherence ” in the language of community. In a nutshell, though community resists “simple or linear definitions,” the underlying coherence of the concept is that it is consistently understood as a positive experience or “good” that meets basic human needs of belonging (like a family) and that it is based ultimately in the nature of relationships and communication. In chapter 2, I considered the issue of community vis-à-vis diversity, what Sidorkin (1999) calls the “central issue of this century” (p. 1). Using postmodernism as an analytic frame, I critiqued the adequacy of “modernist” concepts that assume that commonalities or “sameness” are the only possible bases for community, which, when applied to schools, tend to “balkanize” diverse school populations. I offered as an alternative the idea of “community of otherness,” a way of creating spaces of belonging in contexts of diversity through an ethic of “acceptance of difference with respect, justice and appreciation ” (citing Young, 1986). The central message of my chapter is that notions of community applied to schools must explicitly accommodate diversity in order to prepare students to live in the increasingly diverse civic “community” beyond the schoolhouse door. In chapter 3, Colleen A. Capper, Maureen W. Keyes, and Madeline M. Hafner explored the relationship between community and spirituality, and the extent to which these concepts are oriented toward social justice, helping us see how these ideas are linked in the literature and in practice. They uncovered a strong link between community and spirituality. Indeed, in much of the literature and in their research, spirituality is seen as the ultimate source for the “sense of belonging” in community, as well as for the commitment of leaders engaged in building community. Taken together, section I suggests these lessons for the practice of community in schools: 278 Furman • The practice of community is multidimensional, involving not only behaviors that nurture and facilitate community...