Reviewing the Field of School-Community Relations

• In Event: Examining School-Community Intersections

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a wide-ranging conceptual review of the scholarly literature on the relationships between schools and communities in areas which experience social and economic disadvantage. The review seeks to bring order to a complex field by developing a conceptual map of how the different ways in which these relationships have been understood in the literature. It concludes that there are systematic biases in the field in favour of professionally-dominated and socially-conservative understandings of the nature of disadvantage and the role of schools in relation to communities. Community voices and strategies for producing more fundamental social change are present less frequently in the literature.

Authors

• Alan Dyson, University of Manchester

• Kirstin Kerr, University of Manchester