Community-Centered School Leadership: Radical Care and 'Aperturas' during COVID-19

SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com

Y

14

Leadership; Caring; COVID-19; Pandemics; Administrator Attitudes; Immigrants; Refugees; Family Needs; Videoconferencing; School Community Relationship; Family School Relationship; Equal Education; Elementary Secondary Education; Principals; Assistant Principals

2332-8584

We share school leaders' perspectives on Zoom videos concerning the needs of immigrant and refugee families in Title I schools. In these videos, participants crafted and shared personal narratives about their leadership experiences during the COVID-19 era of education. Rooted in participatory design research methods, the process of designing these videos were both a research project and an intervention to assist families and school leaders to better understand each other. We present a close analysis of administrators' perspectives and describe how our codesigned video methodology enabled participants to coconstruct new meanings of school-community relationships during the pandemic through a radical care framework. We conceptualize these reimaginings as aperturas--cracks in the dominant family engagement paradigm that allow us to collectively work towards transformative ends which we term community-centered school leadership. We conclude the article with recommendations for how both school leadership and research can approach and reimagine family engagement post-pandemic.

As Provided

2023

EJ1360478