The Impact of Classroom Volunteers Beyond the School Walls

• In Event: 60.083 - Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: 60.083-18 - Teacher Leadership for School and Community Transformation

Abstract

This paper presents a study on classroom volunteers in adult education whose leadership goes beyond the school walls. Educational leadership has been analysed in relation to managerial theories, policies and practices (Bush, 2007). Taking into account this, low literate and working-class people have been excluded of management and decision making positions of the adult learning organizations they attend. However, teacher leadership includes approaches that consider leadership possibilities beyond administrative and managerial activities (Frost & Durrant, 2008). This in line with several contributions on adult education in which the same learners take ownership of their education and lead personal and social transformations. This research includes the adult learners’ participation in decision-making and shared management of their school and classrooms. In studying management participation, researchers have been interested in who participates and the rationale for their participation considering dialogue. In this sense, dialogic management (Tellado, 2007) in adult education appears to promote an outstanding organizational practice for adult learning centers, enabling very diverse people to lead. The conceptualization of dialogic management comes from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, including Freire’s (1997) dialogic pedagogy, Habermas’ (1984) theory of communicative action, Flecha’s (2000) dialogic learning, Welton’s (1993) and Holford’s (1996) learning in social movements and, Conway’s (1984) participation in decision-making. All of them, among others, recognize the significance of learners’ participation and the possibility of contributing to social transformation.
The research used a communicative approach to study in depth how learners perceived their participation in leading the classrooms while volunteering in them and the consequences of their participation to the community in an urban school for adults in Barcelona, Spain. For that purpose we conducted 10 communicative life stories with classroom volunteers, two focus groups as well as communicative observation of classroom volunteers inside and outside the classroom. The results of this study explain that the egalitarian dialogue present in different spaces of decision-making of the school allow a direct participation of all the learners in the school spaces and management. This suggests that the egalitarian dialogue is one of the essential elements to explain the high level of participation observable at this school. Classroom volunteers become teacher partners in working together for active citizenship and social justice. Then, some of the strategies to achieve democratic adult educational practices come from an egalitarian dialogue, respect for all participants and the promotion of practices. In conclusion, the involvement of learners in decision-making teams is essential to the success of shared governance and other participative structures outside of the school setting, like neighbourhood associations, cultural organizations and social movements. The study indicates that the experience of classroom volunteers fosters community involvement and later community transformation, through the prior experience developed within the school. Leadership in adult education with the experience of classroom volunteers promotes emancipation, liberation and social awareness. Research involves elements that promote practices in which individuals can accurately define what they want for their learning process but also for their lives.

Authors

• Itxaso Tellado, University of Vic

• Jose Oriol Rios, Universitat Rovira i Virgili

• Noemí Martin Casabona, Universitat Rovira i Virgili