Conceptualizing Leadership for Authentic Partnerships: A Model to Inspire Practice

• In Event: Roundtable Session 116
  In Roundtable Session: Leadership for Authentic Family and Community Partnerships: Research Perspectives to Inspire Practice

Abstract

Purpose & Methods
Despite rhetoric of collaboration, partnerships with families and community groups are rarely based on parity and common purpose (Davies, 2002; Gordon & Louis, 2009; Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009). Schools typically set the agenda, positioning parents as deferential supporters and community groups as service providers (Cooper, 2009; Hargreaves, 2000). This conceptual paper problematizes “partnerships,” argues for authentic partnerships, and offers a model of leadership for partnerships to inform practice. Analysis contrasts critical and mainstream perspectives from about 100 theoretical and empirical works on partnerships, home-school relations, leadership, and social justice.
Conceptual Framework
Authentic partnerships are respectful alliances among educators, families, and community groups that value relationship building, dialog across difference, and sharing power in socially just schools (Auerbach, 2010). They are rooted in authentic participation, relational trust, and relational power.
Anderson (1998) suggests that structures for increased participation in schools have done little to enfranchise marginalized groups. With authentic participation geared to enhanced learning and social justice, leaders “facilitate the opening up of democratic spaces” (p. 593). Relational trust depends on reciprocity, respect, perceived competence, integrity, and personal regard (Bryk & Schneider, 2002). Given distrust in urban schools, leaders should take “actions that reduce parents’ sense of vulnerability” and demonstrate caring (p. 28). Relational power stresses collective “power to” rather than unilateral “power over” subordinates (Warren et al., 2009).
Arguments
I provide a research-based rationale for key components of authentic partnerships--respectful alliances, relationship building, and power sharing—with implications for leaders. For example, while respect for families is often invoked by educators, low-income parents and parents of color often feel dismissed and devalued by school practices and the persistence of deficit thinking. A narrow range of behaviors count as legitimate involvement with little recognition of other forms of support (Auerbach, 2007; Cooper, 2009). In respectful alliances, leaders reject deficit thinking, help staff to reexamine beliefs, approach stakeholders as allies, and validate families’ caring (Pushor, 2010). Likewise, in a relational approach, educators get to know families and elicit their concerns for collective action (Warren et al, 2009).
Finally, I offer a continuum of leadership for partnerships with leadership for authentic partnerships as the goal, associated with relational and empowerment approaches to partnerships and transformational approaches to leadership (Auerbach, 2010; Cooper et al., 2010; Riehl, 2000; Warren et al., 2009). By contrast, leadership preventing partnerships buffers the school from stakeholders (Crowson et al., 2010) and leadership for nominal partnerships features limited outreach on the school’s terms in a public relations approach (Rallis & Goldring, 2000). Leadership for traditional partnerships begins to open the way to authenticity with more extensive activities and two-way communication, as in Epstein (1990). Each category is described with examples linking the disparate partnerships and leadership literature.
Significance
The convergence of calls for shared power in partnerships and collaborative forms of school leadership (Gordon & Louis, 2009) suggests potential for leadership for authentic partnerships. This model offers administrators a tool to analyze what is and could be in working with families and communities.

Author

• Susan Auerbach, California State University - Northridge