Conceptualizing Communally Bonded Schooling: An Imperative for Researching Black Community Life and Improving African American Schooling

• In Event: 64.020 - Of, by, and for the People: Educational Work With Past and Present Black Communities

Abstract

The author will detail his thinking and development of communally-bonded schools as a framework for improving African-American education by noting the methodological, scholarly, and practical implications of such a model for Black schooling today.

Despite a myriad of school reforms such as magnet schools, desegregation, and charter schools, Black students continue to receive subpar education. Strengthening schools that serve Black communities is essential in students’ overall school achievement. Today, scholars and policymakers are increasingly highlighting how schools are important places in the ecological structure of communities, the lives of families and students (Driscoll, 2001; Taylor, McGlynn & Luter, 2013), and how such connections are associated with students’ overall educational experiences, outcomes, and well-being (Furrer & Skinner, 2003; Nasir, Jones & McLaughlin, 2011). Missing from many of these conversations, however, is the value of African-American institutions for African-American students’ educational well-being (Morris, 1999, 2004; Siddle Walker, 2000). For example, researchers and policymakers use terms such as “schools as anchors” when discussing re-making urban schools. Yet, such descriptors insufficiently capture the historical and symbiotic relationships that once existed among schools and African-American students, families, and communities (Morris, 1999; 2004).

First, the presentation will highlight how Du Bois’ “social study” approach (1899), Clark’s “involved observer” (1965) and Foster’s “community nomination” (1997) were pivotal in the development of communally-bonded schooling. Given its focus on strengthening Black communities and schools, a discussion of “communally-bonded schooling” demonstrates how the framework represents an ideological, methodological, and policy shift from conventional school reform. Afterwards, the empirical groundings of communally-bonded schooling will be presented, noting how it emanated from the synthesis of sociological research in urban schools that demonstrated high academic achievement related outcomes for low-income Black students (Morris, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2009, with the historical scholarship on how some African American school-communities effectively educated Black children (Anderson, 1998; Foster, 1997; Irvine & Irvine, 1983; Jones, 1981; Morris & Morris, 2002; Savage, 1998; Siddle Walker, 1996).

Sources include ethnographic data from two decades of research across multiple regions and cities, including (a) a study of desegregation policy in St. Louis and Atlanta, (b) a longitudinal study of middle-class Black adolescents and achievement in an Atlanta Black suburb, (c) a community study from Birmingham, Alabama, and (d) recent investigations of urban school reform and social unrest in St. Louis.

Key components of communally-bonded schooling include: (1) schools served as community pillars; (2) intergenerational and cultural affirming framed the relationships between educators and African American students; (3) educators reached out to families; (4) educators' relationships with students were familial in nature; and (5) principals bridged the school and the community.

Communally-bonded schools may serve as a framework for (1) building ties and networks (i.e., social capital) among schools, families, and communities, and (2) valuing the knowledge and skills (i.e., cultural capital) that families and children bring into schools. It is of further significance because of the long-standing challenges in bringing about Brown’s second promise of quality schooling for Black children, and the intransigence of housing and school segregation in the U.S.

Author

• Jerome E. Morris, University of Missouri-St. Louis