Centering Community Toward a Liberatory Public Education

• In Event: 29.082 - Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: 29.082-22 - Decentering School: Exploring Community Spaces as Rich Sites for Teaching and Learning

Abstract

In the US, acknowledging diversity and achieving democracy have been a dilemma. Democracy has served as an ideal state for achieving the aspirational goals of establishing this nation, while democracy, has continued to threaten the founding aspirations of “all men are created equal” rhetoric. This dilemma has been true in our public schools, despite the history of promoting democracy as the goal of public education. For decades, diversity has been a plumb line for public education, beginning with the landmark US Supreme Court case (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). However, achieving diversity in schools has been a work in progress and includes several forms of struggle and resistance (Bell, 1979), often further marginalizing poor and low-income students as well as students of color. The irony of this history is that despite years of rhetoric of the US “melting pot,” we argue that schools have been among the most effective fronts for resisting any real “melting” between groups.

In this paper, we draw upon the scholarship of Liberatory Education (Gordon, 1970) to offer a conceptual framework that connects recent critical scholarship aimed at achieving democracy in the public school education of diverse peoples. The efforts of scholars, community activists, organizers and champions of democratic education and educational justice to transform public education from a factory that produces workers for a capitalist economy (Bowles, 2014) to the site of social justice (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1998) have helped to push the authors’ thinking about the trajectory of this nation’s last truly public space (Bale & Knopp, 2012). Through review of the literature, we recognize the spread of justice- and liberation-focused inquiry in public education in four areas: a) youth development (Ginwright, 2007; Kirshner, 2015), b) empowering pedagogy, (Gutiérrez, Morales, & Martinez, 2009; Sleeter, 1991) c) school as space for democratic participation, (Glaeser, Ponzetto & Shleifer, 2007), and d) community as context for liberation (Freire, 1985). We aim to contribute to this field of liberatory public education by identifying a fifth area of inquiry: family engagement. Scholarship on family engagement has relied on the assumption of parents as supporters of schooling’s academic and behavioral aims. Within this history, three themes have emerged: a) the substance of public education is achieving academic and behavioral outcomes, b) public education hinges on a series of power dynamics, and c) there is too much focus on individual rather than systemic engagement of families.

From the perspective of the authors, a conceptual model is useful in decentering the institution of schooling in support of public education that is democratic and liberatory. By bringing together youth development, empowering pedagogy, democracy in school, community liberation, and family engagement, we hope to contribute to the work of scholars and educators a recognition that the only way to achieve democracy in an increasingly diverse society is through transformation of public education that centers the local community, includes school in the community context that also involves youth and families, and disrupts cultural hegemony through a struggle for diversifying forms and practices of knowledge.

Authors

• Antwan Jefferson, University of Colorado - Denver

• Cindy Gutierrez, University of Colorado - Denver