Creating a Workplace Culture That Sustains Community School Educators' Purpose and Perspective

• In Event: The Role of Community Schools' Culture and Climate on Students, Teachers, Families, and Community

Abstract

Community schooling is a century old reform strategy experiencing a renaissance in the wake of market-based efforts to dismantle neighborhood or place-based education. As a strategy, community schools call on social justice educators to take on new roles that frame teaching and learning as active, collaborative, and intellectual work that builds on the strengths of local families and meets the needs of the whole child (Co-Author of Presentation 3, 2019). Preparing and sustaining educators to work in community schools means taking these new roles seriously and developing strong, democratic workplace cultures that support educators in this challenging work over time.
Methods and Data Sources
This paper reports on a case study of one community school’s efforts to support the work of teachers across three roles: activist, collaborator, and engaged scholar. Using multiple data sources, including interviews, surveys, and artifacts, the authors--a diverse team of researchers and school leaders--share data on teachers’ experience in these roles as well as school-level data on school culture, professional norms, and retention.
Results
The context for this case study is a university-assisted community school (Benson et al., 2017), established in 2009 as a collaboration between a large urban school district, a public university, and a local, high-poverty immigrant community. The paper briefly outlines the school’s history and context to set the stage for three case study vignettes that capture workplace structures and norms developed at the school to prepare and sustain educators as activists, collaborators, and engaged scholars. The activist vignette focuses on educators’ work to support and protect the rights of immigrant families following the 2016 federal election. This courageous work extended far beyond the classroom and included creating school-wide protocols with student groups to prepare for the entry of federal ICE agents and establishing a legal clinic on campus. The second vignette foregrounds the school’s democratic governance structures and the role of educators as lead teachers, division chairs, hiring committee members, mentor teachers, and more. The authors articulate the challenge of getting democracy “right,” distributing decision making in ways that honor collaboration and voice but also allow the school to move ahead and get things done. The final vignette shares the story of a five-year research-practice partnership between a group of teachers and graduate students to define and advance the school’s bilingual program. As engaged scholars, teachers studied and deepened their literacy practices to build upon their students’ full repertoire of linguistic assets.
Scholarly Significance
The paper concludes by tying the three vignettes to the literature on teacher retention and the struggle to balance expanded community school roles and responsibilities with the need for reasonable and sustainable working conditions (Johnson & Landman, 2002). The authors discuss the implications of their research for locally developed work rules as well as collective bargaining agreements between teachers’ unions and school boards (American Federation of Teachers, 2017; Strunk et al., 2018).

Authors

• Karen Hunter Quartz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Marisa Saunders, University of California - Los Angeles

• Leyda Waleska Garcia, UCLA Community School

• Queena Kim, Los Angeles Unified School District